This man had
a son whom he brought up in the ignorance usual to the lowly condition
of a peasant boy. But the extraordinary powers of the child,
uncultivated as they necessarily were, and his surprising quickness of
perception and never-failing vivacity, made him the delight of his
father, and of the unsophisticated people among whom he lived. At the
age of ten, his father intrusted him with the care of a flock. Now the
happy little shepherd-boy strolled at his will over meadow and plain
with his woolly charge, and amused himself with lying on the grass, and
sketching, as fancy led him, the surrounding objects, on broad flat
stones, sand, or soft earth. His sole pencils were a hard stick, or a
sharp piece of stone; his chief models were his flock, which he used to
copy as they gathered around him in various attitudes. One day, as the
shepherd-boy lay in the midst of his flock, earnestly sketching
something on a stone, there came by a traveler. Struck with the boy's
deep attention to his work, and the unconscious grace of his attitude,
the stranger stopped, and went to look at his work. It was a sketch of a
sheep, drawn with such freedom and truth of nature, that the traveler
beheld it with astonishment. "Whose son are you?" cried he, with
eagerness. The startled boy looked up in the face of his questioner. "My
father is Bondone the laborer, and I am his little Giotto, so please the
signor," said he.
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