The young Count accorded his guest full liberty to investigate the

personal annals of these pictured worthies, as well as all the rest

of his progenitors; and ample materials were at hand in many chests of

worm-eaten papers and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into

larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But, to confess the

truth, the information afforded by these musty documents was so much

more prosaic than what Kenyon acquired from Tomaso's legends, that even

the superior authenticity of the former could not reconcile him to its

dullness. What especially delighted the sculptor was the analogy between

Donatello's character, as he himself knew it, and those peculiar traits

which the old butler's narrative assumed to have been long hereditary

in the race. He was amused at finding, too, that not only Tomaso but the

peasantry of the estate and neighboring village recognized his friend

as a genuine Monte Beni, of the original type. They seemed to cherish a

great affection for the young Count, and were full of stories about his

sportive childhood; how he had played among the little rustics, and been

at once the wildest and the sweetest of them all; and how, in his very

infancy, he had plunged into the deep pools of the streamlets and never

been drowned, and had clambered to the topmost branches of tall trees

without ever breaking his neck. No such mischance could happen to the

sylvan child because, handling all the elements of nature so fearlessly

and freely, nothing had either the power or the will to do him harm.

He grew up, said these humble friends, the playmate not only of all

mortal kind, but of creatures of the woods; although, when Kenyon

pressed them for some particulars of this latter mode of companionship,

they could remember little more than a few anecdotes of a pet fox, which

used to growl and snap at everybody save Donatello himself.

But they enlarged--and never were weary of the theme--upon the

blithesome effects of Donatello's presence in his rosy childhood and

budding youth. Their hovels had always glowed like sunshine when he

entered them; so that, as the peasants expressed it, their young master

had never darkened a doorway in his life. He was the soul of vintage

festivals. While he was a mere infant, scarcely able to run alone, it

had been the custom to make him tread the winepress with his tender

little feet, if it were only to crush one cluster of the grapes. And the

grape-juice that gushed beneath his childish tread, be it ever so small

in quantity, sufficed to impart a pleasant flavor to a whole cask of

wine. The race of Monte Beni--so these rustic chroniclers assured

the sculptor--had possessed the gift from the oldest of old times of

expressing good wine from ordinary grapes, and a ravishing liquor from

the choice growth of their vineyard.




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