"'It is a tradition,' he said, 'that the blessed Virgin was sought in marriage by so many young men that her parents besought the high-priest to aid them in their choice of her husband. He accordingly demanded that her suitors should give their staves into his keeping, to be placed over night before the altar, with the understanding, in which Mary herself meekly acquiesced, that he whose staff budded should become her husband. On the morrow Joseph's staff was found to have put forth blossoms. This legend, as you see, our artist has followed in his painting, for not only is Joseph's staff tipped by a cluster of small flowers, but the young men who accompany him, the disappointed suitors, bear flowerless staves, and one of the rejected is breaking his across his knee in token of his vexation.' "Of this incident I would make no account, had it not been the occasion for Bazzi's unmannerly trick. For that graceless fellow chancing to spy leaning against his easel, the rod upon which Raphael was wont to rest his hand while painting, he very slyly made fast to it a nosegay of orange blossoms which the Signor Chigi had presented to me on my entrance and which I had carelessly let fall. "You cannot imagine the coil which this trick occasioned, for its author speedily called our host's attention to the decorated rod, and the signification of its adornment was at once apprehended to be my own approval of the painter. "Raphael alone retained his senses, for he at once divined that the perpetrator of the jest was his scapegrace friend and extorted from him full confession of his prank, asserting that it was inconceivable that I could have had any part in it.