ed in the Nunnery Church and on the still moist plaster
began to paint, with wondrous vigour of execution, the history of Jesus
Christ. First of all, to the right of the Altar, he illustrated the
massacre of the Holy Innocents, and succeeded in expressing so vividly
the grief and rage of the mothers trying vainly to save their little
ones from the Roman soldiers' hands, that the very wall seemed to chant
like the faithful in Church, "_Cur, Crudelis Herodes?..._" Drawn thither
by curiosity, the Nuns used to come, two or three of them together, to
watch the master at work. At sight of all these despairing mothers and
murdered babes, they could not help sobbing and shedding tears. In
particular there was one little fellow Buffalmacco had drawn lying in
his swaddling bands, smiling and sucking his thumb, between a soldier's
legs. The Nuns begged and prayed this one might not be killed:

"Oh! spare him," they said to the Painter. "Do take care the soldiers
don't see him and kill him!"

The good Buffalmacco answered:

"For love of you, dear sisters, I will protect him all I can. But these
murderers are filled with so savage a rage, it will be a difficult
matter to stop them."

When they declared "The baby _is_ such a little darling!..." he offered
to make each of them a little darling prettier still.

"Thank you kindly!" they answered back, laughing.

The Abbess came in her turn to assure herself with her own eyes that the
work was being done satisfactorily. She was a lady of very high birth,
named Usimbalda, a proud, severe and careful personage. Seeing a man
working without cloak or hood, and like a common labourer wearing only
shirt and hose, she mistook him for some apprentice lad and did not
condescend so much as to speak to him. She came again and again, five or
six times, to the Chapel, without ever seeing any one more important
than this working fellow she deemed only fit to grind the colours. Out
of all patience at last, she showed him she was far from satisfied.

"My lad," she bade him, "tell your master from me he must come and work
himself at the pictures I commissioned him to paint. I meant them to be
the work of his own hand, not a mere apprentice's."

Far from declaring himself, Buffalmacco put on the look and voice of a
poor working-man, and humbly answered Usimbalda, that he saw plain
enough he was not of the sort to inspire confidence in so noble a lady,
and that his duty was to obey.

"I will info