We found Mr. Wake and Viola across the big Piazza, loitering in the shade, and Mr. Wake said that it was too hot for anything but his own shady garden and iced tea, and so we left the funny, pretty little town and started down a narrow roadway that ran between high walls, or slopes that were covered with olive trees. Every color was accentuated. . . . Houses that were faint pink, seemed salmon; greens almost clashed; the dust of the roadway was a vivid yellow, and down in the hollow below us, Florence spread out, a steaming, gleaming mass of tightly packed palaces, shining spires, and gleaming towers. “Ah, Giotto,” said Mr. Wake, as we halted at a bend in the way and looked down at our own city. He said this, for he loved the tower that Giotto had planned and had seen half built before his death. “Ever hear,” said Mr. Wake, “of how the little Giotto was found, and how he was helped to become the great artist that he was?” I hadn’t, and I said so. Viola thought she had, but she said she forgot so _many_ things, when Mr. Wake questioned her a little. “Well,” he said, “since Viola has forgotten, and Jane frankly admits she doesn’t know, indulge an old man in his love of the telling of picturesque stories.” “I _love_ them,” I said, for I really did. His stories were about people who had lived and died, and they never had Irish or Hebrew or Swedish people in them to make him try a dialect. I don’t care so very much for that sort. And Mr. Wake didn’t even _try_ to be funny, which is unusual in a man. “Well,” he said, as he took off his hat and mopped his brow, “one day when Cimabue, who was a great artist, and a fine chap, was strolling through the country he came to a clearing in which a little boy was tending sheep. And perhaps because he was in an ill humor--probably thinking all art was going to the bad, for he was a critic too, you know, and critics have thought that since the beginning of paint--anyway, I feel that an ill humor set upon him, and that he was, because of it, minded to stop, and divert himself by talking a bit to a little country lad.