to another, and understood why the child had been so afraid to bring them to it.
'This is a coffin of to-day!' cried one of them, who had penetrated into the third chamber, where old Joconda lay.
'Some one lives here, sleeps and eats here, and here buries his dead,' said his companion. 'A woman it must be, for here are female clothes and the distaff.'
'It is strange,' replied the other. 'But it is a grand tomb, and finely preserved. Let us make sketches while we can.'
And they sat down and spread out the colours they carried with them, for they were both artists, and one was a scholar. The latter sketched the proportions of the chambers of death, and copied the strange figures of the dancing women, of the winged boys, of the lotus flowers. The other made a drawing of the spinning wheel and the mandoline and the blackberry boughs that were thrown, full of berries, across an Etruscan dish, while a bronze lamp stood on the floor beside a bowl full of yellow marsh lilies.
The one would serve for some grand cartoon of an Etruscan marriage feast or burial banquet. The other would serve for some minute genre picture.
