They stood awhile, contemplating the scene; but, as inevitably happens after a spiritual flight, it was not long before the sculptor felt his wings flagging in the rarity of the upper atmosphere.  He was glad to let himself quietly downward out of the mid-sky, as it were, and alight on the solid platform of the battlemented tower.  He looked about him, and beheld growing out of the stone pavement, which formed the roof, a little shrub, with green and glossy leaves.  It was the only green thing there; and Heaven knows how its seeds had ever been planted, at that airy height, or how it had found nourishment for its small life in the chinks of the stones; for it had no earth, and nothing more like soil than the crumbling mortar, which had been crammed into the crevices in a long-past age.

Yet the plant seemed fond of its native site; and Donatello said it had always grown there from his earliest remembrance, and never, he believed, any smaller or any larger than they saw it now.

“I wonder if the shrub teaches you any good lesson,” said he, observing the interest with which Kenyon examined it.  “If the wide valley has a great meaning, the plant ought to have at least a little one; and it has been growing on our tower long enough to have learned how to speak it.”

“O, certainly!” answered the sculptor; “the shrub has its moral, or it would have perished long ago.  And, no doubt, it is for your use and edification, since you have had it before your eyes all your lifetime, and now are moved to ask what may be its lesson.”

“It teaches me nothing,” said the simple Donatello, stooping over the plant, and perplexing himself with a minute scrutiny.  “But here was a worm that would have killed it; an ugly creature, which I will fling over the battlements.”

CHAPTER XXIX

ON THE BATTLEMENTS

The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the rocky foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.

“Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,” said he.  “But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency to climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the depth below.  If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should fling myself down after that bit of lime.  It is a very singular temptation, and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it might be so easily done, and partly because such momentous consequences would ensue, without my being compelled to wait a moment for them.  Have you never felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit at your back, shoving you towards a precipice?”

“Ah, no!” cried.  Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a face of horror.  “I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!—­and beyond its verge, nothing but the chilly dark!  And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful death!”