warranted to turn all
corners easily. Round the base were living figures of saints and angels
arrayed in sculpturesque fashion; and on the summit, at the height of
thirty feet, well bound to an iron rod and holding an iron cross also
firmly infixed, stood a living representative of Saint John the Baptist,
with arms and legs bare, a garment of tiger-skins about his body, and a
golden nimbus fastened on his head--as the Precursor was wont to appear
in the cloisters and churches, not having yet revealed himself to
painters as the brown and sturdy boy who made one of the Holy Family.
For where could the image of the patron saint be more fitly placed than
on the symbol of the Zecca? Was not the royal prerogative of coining
money the surest token that a city had won its independence? and by the
blessing of San Giovanni this "beautiful sheepfold" of his had shown
that token earliest among the Italian cities. Nevertheless, the annual
function of representing the patron saint was not among the high prizes
of public life; it was paid for with something like ten shillings, a
cake weighing fourteen pounds, two bottles of wine, and a handsome
supply of light eatables; the money being furnished by the magnificent
Zecca, and the payment in kind being by peculiar "privilege" presented
in a basket suspended on a pole from an upper window of a private house,
whereupon the eidolon of the austere saint at once invigorated himself
with a reasonable share of the sweets and wine, threw the remnants to
the crowd, and embraced the mighty cake securely with his right arm
through the remainder of his passage. This was the attitude in which
the mimic San Giovanni presented himself as the tall car jerked and
vibrated on its slow way round the piazza to the northern gate of the
Baptistery.

"There go the Masters of the Zecca, and there is my brother--you see
him, Melema?" cried Cennini, with an agreeable stirring of pride at
showing a stranger what was too familiar to be remarkable to
fellow-citizens. "Behind come the members of the Corporation of
Calimara, [Note 2] the dealers in foreign cloth, to which we have given
our Florentine finish; men of ripe years, you see, who were matriculated
before you were born; and then comes the famous Art of Money-changers."

"Many of them matriculated also to the noble art of usury before you
were born," interrupted Francesco Cei, "as you may discern by a certain
fitful glare of the eye and sharp curve of