“I’m sorry,” Mr. Cardan protested. “But perhaps it’s all for the best. Meanwhile, what about that butcher’s boy? What _does_ he mean by a bit of very old sculpture? Is it the head of some rich Etruscan cheese-monger of Lunae that they’ve dug up? Some long-nosed primitive oriental with a smile of imbecile rapture on his face? Or a fragment of one of his Hellenised posterity, reclining on the lid of his sarcophagus as though along his prandial couch and staring blankly out of a head that might, if Praxiteles had carved it, have been Apollo’s, but which the Etruscan mason has fattened into an all too human grossness? Or perhaps it’s a Roman bust, so thoroughly real, life-like and up-to-date that, but for the toga, we might almost take it for our old friend Sir William Midrash, the eminent civil servant. Or perhaps—and I should like that better—perhaps it dates from that strange, grey Christian dawn that followed the savage night into which the empire went down. I can imagine some fragment from Modena or Toscanella—some odd, unpredictable figure bent by excess of faith into the most profoundly expressive and symbolic of attitudes: a monster physically, a barbarism, a little mumbo-jumbo, but glowing so passionately with inward life—it may be lovely, it may be malignant—that it is impossible to look at it with indifference or merely as a shape, ugly or beautiful. Yes. I should like the thing to be a piece of Romanesque carving. I’d give the butcher’s boy an extra five francs if it were. But if it turned out to be one of those suave Italian Gothic saints elegantly draped and leaning a little sideways, like saplings in the mystical breeze—and it might be, you never can tell—I’d deduct five francs. Not but what it mightn’t fetch just as much in the American market. But how they bore me, those accomplished Gothicisms, how they bore me!” They were at the top of the hill. Emerging from the sloping forest of olive trees, the road now ran along a bare and almost level ridge. Some little way off, where the ground began to rise once more towards further heights, one could see a cluster of houses and a church tower. Mr. Cardan pointed.