Dismal and grim though the exterior of that palazzo was, needing but towers and machicolated parapets to seem a fortress, or an encircling wall to seem a frowning monastery where cowled figures met each other only to whisper sepulchrally, "Brother, we must die," it was yet the scene of not a few laughable experiences. And perhaps even in this respect it may not have differed so widely as one might think from cloistered shades of other days, when out of sad, earth-colored raiment and the habit of dismal speech human sentiment painted pictures while yet the fagots grew apace for their destruction as well as for the funeral-pyre of their scolding and bellowing enemy, Savonarola. For where Fra Angelico, working from the life, could create a San Sebastian so instinct with earthly vitality and earthly bloom that pious Florentine women could not say their prayers in peace in its presence, there were three easels, each bearing a canvas, in different parts of the room. Before each easel worked a Leatherstonepaugh, each clad with classic simplicity in a long blue cotton garment, decorated with many colors and smelling strongly of retouching varnish, that covered her from the white ruffle at her throat to the upper edge of her black alpaca flounce. The room was silent, and, except for the deft action of brushes, motionless. Only that from below was heard the musical splash of the Barberini Tritons, and that from the windows could be seen the sombre pines of the Ludovisi gardens swaying in solemn rhythmic measure must have been sometimes unbending from the dole and drear of mediaeval asceticism into something very like human fun. One day the Leatherstonepaughs were all at work in the immense studio. Silentia alone was idle, and, somewhat indecorously draped only in a bit of old tapestry, with dishevelled hair and lolling head, leaned against the wall, apparently in the last stages of inebriety. There against the blue sky, all the world would have seemed petrified into the complete passiveness of sitting for its picture. [Illustration: YOUNG CAIN INTERVIEWING SILENTIA.] Marietta was their model. She was posed in a nun's dress, pensive gray, with virginal white bound primly across her brow. Marietta is a capital model, and her sad face and tender eyes were upturned with exactly the desired expression to the grinning mask in the centre of the ceiling. Silentia kindly consented to pose for the cross to which the nun clung; that is, she wobbled weakly into the place where the sacred emblem would have been were this Nature and not Art, and where the cross would be in the picture when completed. Marietta clung devoutly to Silentia's ankles, and Silentia looked as cross as possible. "How unusual to see one of Italia's children with a face like that!" said a Leatherstonepaugh as she studied the nun's features. "One would say that she had really found peace only after some terrible suffering."