the blue and the
orange glowing in its niches and its lunettes like enamels, and its
statues of the apostles strong and noble, like the times in which they
were created,--St. Peter with his keys, and St. Mark with his open book,
and St. George leaning on his sword, and others also, solemn and austere
as they, austere though benign, for do they not guard the White
Tabernacle of Oreagna within?

The church stands firm as a rock, square as a fortress of stone, and the
winds and the waters of the skies may beat about it as they will, they
have no power to disturb its sublime repose. Sometimes I think of all
the noble things in all our Italy Or San Michele is the noblest,
standing there in its stern magnificence, amidst people's hurrying feet
and noisy laughter, a memory of God.

The little masters of Moufflou lived right in its shadow, where the
bridge of stone spans the space between the houses and the church high
in mid-air; and little Lolo loved the church with a great love. He loved
it in the morning-time, when the sunbeams turned it into dusky gold and
jasper; he loved it in the evening-time, when the lights of its altars
glimmered in the dark, and the scent of its incense came out into the
street; he loved it in the great feasts, when the huge clusters of
lilies were borne inside it; he loved it in the solemn nights of winter;
the flickering gleam of the dull lamps shone on the robes of an apostle,
or the sculpture of a shield, or the glow of a casement-moulding in
majolica. He loved it always, and, without knowing why, he called it _la
mia chiesa_.

Lolo, being lame and of delicate health, was not enabled to go to school
or to work, though he wove the straw covering of wine-flasks and plaited
the cane matting with busy fingers. But for the most part he did as he
liked, and spent most of his time sitting on the parapet of Or San
Michele, watching the venders of earthenware at their trucks, or
trotting with his crutch (and he could trot a good many miles when he
chose) out with Moufflou down a bit of the Stocking-makers' Street,
along under the arcades of the Uffizi, and so over the Jewellers'
Bridge, and out of byways that he knew into the fields on the hill-side
upon the other bank of Arno. Moufflou and he would spend half the
day--all the day--out there in daffodil-time; and Lolo would come home
with great bundles and sheaves of golden flowers, and he and Moufflou
were happy.

His mother never liked to say a ha