e arm of the stranger, and led him to a
point, on the south side of the piazza, from which he could see at once
the huge dark shell of the cupola, the slender soaring grace of Giotto's
campanile, and the quaint octagon of San Giovanni in front of them,
showing its unique gates of storied bronze, which still bore the
somewhat dimmed glory of their original gilding. The inlaid marbles
were then fresher in their pink, and white, and purple, than they are
now, when the winters of four centuries have turned their white to the
rich ochre of well-mellowed meerschaum; the facade of the cathedral did
not stand ignominious in faded stucco, but had upon it the magnificent
promise of the half-completed marble inlaying and statued niches, which
Giotto had devised a hundred and fifty years before; and as the
campanile in all its harmonious variety of colour and form led the eyes
upward, high into the clear air of this April morning, it seemed a
prophetic symbol, telling that human life must somehow and some time
shape itself into accord with that pure aspiring beauty.

But this was not the impression it appeared to produce on the Greek.
His eyes were irresistibly led upward, but as he stood with his arms
folded and his curls falling backward, there was a slight touch of scorn
on his lip, and when his eyes fell again they glanced round with a
scanning coolness which was rather piquing to Nello's Florentine spirit.

"Well, my fine young man," he said, with some impatience, "you seem to
make as little of our Cathedral as if you were the Angel Gabriel come
straight from Paradise. I should like to know if you have ever seen
finer work than our Giotto's tower, or any cupola that would not look a
mere mushroom by the side of Brunelleschi's there, or any marbles finer
or more cunningly wrought than these that our Signoria got from far-off
quarries, at a price that would buy a dukedom. Come, now, have you ever
seen anything to equal them?"

"If you asked me that question with a scimitar at my throat, after the
Turkish fashion, or even your own razor," said the young Greek, smiling
gaily, and moving on towards the gates of the Baptistery, "I daresay you
might get a confession of the true faith from me. But with my throat
free from peril, I venture to tell you that your buildings smack too
much of Christian barbarism for my taste. I have a shuddering sense of
what there is inside--hideous smoked Madonnas; fleshless saints in
mosaic, star