“No, no,” persisted Bertino. “It must be some man as big as Garibaldi. That’s it. But not a dead Garibaldi. He must be alive, so that I may sell him the bust that you will make of him. What would you do with a man like that, for example?” “Well,” said Armando, pausing and looking up at the ceiling, as though weighing the matter carefully, “I should make a very fine bust of such a man.” “Bravo!” cried Bertino. “With a piece of your best work for a sample, how long should I be getting orders for more? Not many days, I promise. And the Americans have gold. What say you, my friend? Is it not a grand idea?” “_Si, si_; a grand idea.” In truth it loomed before Armando as the chance of his life. Now as ardent as the other, he agreed to begin work upon a bust in marble so soon as he should receive from America a photograph of the chosen subject. When finished he would send it to New York, there to be put on exhibition and offered for sale. That afternoon the Saale steamed from Genoa Bay with Bertino a steerage passenger. Some time after the ship had swung from her quay Armando and Marianna looked from the studio window over the cypress fringe toward the gap in the mountains that shows the sails of ships but conceals the Mediterranean’s waves. Presently a black bar of smoke moving lazily across the aperture told them that he was on his way. Near the window a block of Carrara marble glistened pure and white in the sunlight. Armando wondered what manner of being he should release from it--a President, a money king, or a great American beauty? CHAPTER II CASA DI BELLO THE banked fire of America’s Sabbath gave its quiet to Bowling Green the day that Bertino landed in New York. It was not the New York he had seen so often from the heights of Cardinali. The cloud-piercing houses had always loomed in his dream pictures, but no returned exile had ever told him that they filled the soul with this nameless dread. He longed to be in Mulberry, which all travellers agreed was the next best thing to being in Italy. With a goatskin box under one arm, a tawny cotton umbrella pressed by the other, and his left hand clutching the knotted ends of a kerchief holding more luggage, he set out from the Barge Office. In the band of his narrow-brimmed black soft hat--the precious adornment of festal days--stood a gray turkey feather, and about his bare neck in sailor noose was tied a cravat of satin, green as the myrtle of his native steeps. As he strode up Broadway, past old Trinity and Wall Street, the heavy fall of his hobnailed boots started the echoes of the New World’s financial centre.