The innocents abroad; (1897) (14775175521)

Identifier: innocentsabroad01twai (find matches)
Title: The innocents abroad;
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
Subjects: Voyages and travels
Publisher: Hartford, American publishing company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress



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that any ofthem have called for theirdividends yet. One mandid fight along till he wassixty, and started after hispension, but it appearedthat there had been a mis-take of a year in his fam-ily record, and so he gaveIt up and died. These artists will take particles of stone or glass no largerthan a mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve but-ton or a shirt stud, so smoothly and with such nice adjust-ment of the delicate shades of color the pieces bear, as toform a pigmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals complete,and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though IS^ature hadbuilded it herself. They will counterfeit a fly, or a high-toned bug, or the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circleof a breastpin, and do it so deftly and so neatly that any manmight think a master painted it. I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence—a little trifle of a centre table—whose top was made of somesort of precious polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the
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THE PENSIONER. WONDERFUL MOSAICS. 247 ■figure of a flute, with bell-moutli and a mazy complication ofkeys. No painting in the world could have been softer orricher •, no shading out of one tint into another could havebeen more perfect; no work of art of any kind could havebeen more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multi-tude of little fragments of stone of which they swore it wasformed would bankrupt any mans arithmetic! I do notthink one could have seen where two particles joined eachother with eyes of ordinary shrewdness. Certainly we coulddetect no such blemish.- This table-top cost the labor of oneman for ten long years, so they said, and it was for sale forthirty-five thousand dollars. We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time,in Florence, to weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo,Raphael and Machiavelli, (I su23pose they are buried there,but it may be that they reside elsewhere and rent their tombsto other parties—such being the fashion in Italy