bas-reliefs from photographs. He was determined to purchase his
freedom, and a sculptor requires money more than any other artist.

Rodney had always looked upon Dublin as a place to escape from. He
had always desired a country where there was sunshine and
sculpture. The day his father took him to the School of Art he had
left his father talking to the head-master, and had wandered away
to look at a Florentine bust, and this first glimpse of Italy had
convinced him that he must go to Italy and study Michael Angelo
and Donatello. Only twice had he relaxed the severity of his rule
of life and spent his holidays in Italy. He had gone there with
forty pounds in his pocket, and had studied art where art had
grown up naturally, independent of Government grants and
mechanical instruction, in a mountain town like Perugia; and his
natural home had seemed to him those narrow, white streets
streaked with blue shadows. "Oh, how blue the shadows are there in
the morning," he had said the other night to Harding, "and the
magnificent sculpture and painting! In the afternoon the sun is
too hot, but at evening one stands at the walls of the town and
sees sunsets folding and unfolding over Italy. I am at home amid
those Southern people, and a splendid pagan life is always before
one's eyes, ready to one's hand. Beautiful girls and boys are
always knocking at one's doors. Beautiful nakedness abounds.
Sculpture is native to the orange zone--the embers of the
renaissance smoulder under orange-trees."

He had never believed in any Celtic renaissance, and all the talk
he had heard about stained glass and the revivals did not deceive
him. "Let the Gael disappear," he said. "He is doing it very
nicely. Do not interfere with his instinct. His instinct is to