home and beat it up. The clay is wet still.' I stood like a man in a madhouse. Beat it up! as if my loftiest ideas were broth. Whilst I stood there, unable to utter a word, up stepped the monsignori, stuck their learned spectacles on their noses, and abused it before and behind till they did not leave a nail's breadth without a spot of blame, just as when the old wolf half kills a sheep, and then hands it over to her whelps to worry and whet their milk-teeth upon. If I could only have spoken and described all that had passed through my brain whilst I was at work on the model, perhaps the old man might have looked at it differently, for they say that he has a good-enough head. But just at this unlucky moment he was full of ill temper, and poured it all out over me. So at last I got tired of this chattering, this whizzing of children's painted bird-bolts, not one of which hit the matter, and every one the man, for they pricked me like needles. Another would have shaken himself laughingly, and perhaps have won the day. But I--how was I to do it? My father did not make much talk over his cameos, and when he died, Rome was neither more agitated nor stiller, and I have ever kept out of the way of your learned men; so I stole away from them this time too, and swore never to have aught to do with them again. As I passed along the Repelta I got into a rage, and threw my model into the Tiber. 'Let it melt there,' said I to myself; and I felt relieved, and took a fancy to go and walk about the campagna. There you found me." "You must not abuse the _savant_," said Theodore, laughingly, after a pause, in order to bring the other, who had sunk into a reverie, back to the subject. "Your instinct did not deceive you when you felt an antipathy to my being near you. For I am here in Rome for the purpose of poking about old parchments, and digging out long-buried matters, about which but few are interested. Histories of the old Italian towers, state papers, and judicial reports. And so we are doubly-separated individuals." "_You_ may be, and do what you like," said Bianchi, quickly, and half aside. "You are good and handsome, and a German." "You little know German learning. It is even more horrible than the Roman. I myself have a secret terror of it. It has a power of glaring at feeble souls, that turns them into stone, like those poor rogues who gazed on the face of the Medusa." "The Medusa?" "You must know her better than I do. Have you not thrown her away there in the corner and left her, half begun and half ended, cut upon the shells on your work-table?"