One story, or myth, that had mixed itself up with their mouldy genealogy, interested the sculptor by its wild, and perhaps grotesque, yet not unfascinating peculiarity.  He caught at it the more eagerly, as it afforded a shadowy and whimsical semblance of explanation for the likeness which he, with Miriam and Hilda, had seen or fancied between Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles.

The Monte Beni family, as this legend averred, drew their origin from the Pelasgic race, who peopled Italy in times that may be called prehistoric.  It was the same noble breed of men, of Asiatic birth, that settled in Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in Arcadia, and—­whether they ever lived such life or not—­enriched the world with dreams, at least, and fables, lovely, if unsubstantial, of a Golden Age.  In those delicious times, when deities and demigods appeared familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with friend,—­when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or fable hardly took pains to hide themselves in the primeval woods,—­at that auspicious period the lineage of Monte Beni had its rise.  Its progenitor was a being not altogether human, yet partaking so largely of the gentlest human qualities, as to be neither awful nor shocking to the imagination.  A sylvan creature, native among the woods, had loved a mortal maiden, and—­perhaps by kindness, and the subtile courtesies which love might teach to his simplicity, or possibly by a ruder wooing—­had won her to his haunts.  In due time he gained her womanly affection; and, making their bridal bower, for aught we know, in the hollow of a great tree, the pair spent a happy wedded life in that ancient neighborhood where now stood Donatello’s tower.

From this union sprang a vigorous progeny that took its place unquestioned among human families.  In that age, however, and long afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable lineaments of its wild paternity:  it was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social law.  They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as the sunshine, passionate as the tornado.  Their lives were rendered blissful by art unsought harmony with nature.

But, as centuries passed away, the Faun’s wild blood had necessarily been attempered with constant intermixtures from the more ordinary streams of human life.  It lost many of its original qualities, and served for the most part only to bestow an unconquerable vigor, which kept the family from extinction, and enabled them to make their own part good throughout the perils and rude emergencies of their interminable descent.  In the constant wars with which Italy was plagued, by the dissensions of her petty states and republics, there was a demand for native hardihood.

The successive members of the Monte Beni family showed valor and policy enough’ at all events, to keep their hereditary possessions out of the clutch of grasping neighbors, and probably differed very little from the other feudal barons with whom they fought and feasted.  Such a degree of conformity with the manners of the generations through which it survived, must have been essential to the prolonged continuance of the race.