VII. MACUGNAGA 361

the great pillage-reservoir galleries.¹ The monks let me sit close to it and work, as long as I liked, and went on with their cup-rinsings and cope-foldings without minding me. If any priest of the higher dignities came in, I was careful always to rise reverently, and get his kind look, or bow, or perhaps a stray crumb of benediction. When I was tired of drawing, I went into the Spezieria, and learned what ineffable sweetnesses and incenses were in the herbs and leaves that had gathered the sunbeams of Florence into their life;² and bought little bundles of bottles, an inch long, and as thick as a moderately sized quill, with Araby the blest and a spice island or two inside each. Then in the afternoon a bit of street or gallery work, and after dinner, always up either to Fésole or San Miniato. In those days, I think it never rained but when one wanted it to, (and not always then³); wherever you chanced to be, if you got tired, and had no friends to be bothered with, you lay down on the next bank and went to sleep, to the song of the cicadas, which, with a great deal of making believe, might at last, somehow, be thought nice.

128. I did make one friend in Florence, however, for love of Switzerland, Rudolph Durheim, a Bernese student, of solid bearish gifts and kindly strength. I took to him at first because of a clearly true drawing he had made of his little blue-eyed twelve-years-old simplicity of a goat-herd sister; but found him afterwards a most helpful and didactic friend. He objected especially to my losing time in sentiment or over-hot vaporization, and would have had me draw something every afternoon, whether it suited my fancy or not. “Ça vaut déjà la peine,” said he, stopping on the way to the Certosa, under a group of hillside cottages; it was my first serious lesson in Italian backgrounds; and if we had worked on together, so and so

¹ [Now in Cell No. 34 in the “Museo di S. Marco.” The size of the panel is 13½ in. by 10.]

² [For other descriptions of and references to the Spezieria, see Vol. IV. p. 352 n.; Vol. XII. p. 251; and Vol. XXIV. p. 275.]

³ [Compare above, p. 159.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]