The station being reached at last—­for even in Italy journeys end—­I rejected the offers of two cabmen, one cabwoman, and one bus driver, and walked.  There was no doubt as to the direction, with the campanile of the duomo as a beacon.  For a quarter of a mile the road is straight and narrow; then it broadens into an open space and Castel Franco appears.  It is a castle indeed.  All the old town is within vast crumbling red walls built on a mound with a moat around them.  Civic zeal has trimmed the mound into public “grounds,” and the moat is lively with ornamental ducks; while a hundred yards farther rises the white statue of Castel Franco’s greatest son, no other than Giorgione himself, a dashing cavalier-like gentleman with a brush instead of a rapier.  If he were like this, one can believe the story of his early death—­little more than thirty—­which came about through excessive love of a lady, she having taken the plague and he continuing to visit her.

Having examined the statue I penetrated the ramparts to the little town, in the midst of which is the church.  It was however locked, as a band of children hastened to tell me:  intimating also that if anyone on earth knew how to effect an entrance they were the little devils in question.  So I was led to a side door, the residence of a fireman, and we pulled a bell, and in an instant out came the fireman to extinguish whatever was burning; but on learning my business he instantly became transformed into the gentlest of sacristans, returned for his key, and led me, followed by the whole pack of children, by this time greatly augmented, to a door up some steps on the farther side of the church.  The pack was for coming in too, but a few brief yet sufficient threats from the sacristan acted so thoroughly that not only did they melt away then but were not there when I came out—­this being in Italy unique as a merciful disappearance.  More than merciful, miraculous, leading one to believe that Giorgione’s picture really has supernatural powers.

The picture is on a wall behind the high altar, curtained.  The fireman-sacristan pulled away the curtain, handed me a pair of opera glasses and sat down to watch me, a task in which he was joined by another man and a boy who had been cleaning the church.  There they sat, the three of them, all huddled together, saying nothing, but staring hard at me (as I could feel) with gimlet eyes; while a few feet distant I sat too, peering through the glasses at Giorgione’s masterpiece, of which I give a reproduction on the opposite page.

It is very beautiful; it grows more beautiful; but it does not give me such pleasure as the Giovanelli pastoral.  I doubt if Giorgione had the altar-piece temperament.  He was not for churches; and indeed there were so many brushes for churches, that his need never have been called upon.  He was wholly individual, wistful, pleasure-seeking and pleasure-missing, conscious of the brevity of life and the elusiveness of joy; of the earth earthy; a kind of Keats in colour, with, as one critic—­I think Mr. Ricketts—­has pointed out, something of Rossetti too.  Left to himself he would have painted only such idylls as the Giovanelli picture.