to the tips of his
fingers. Just as a carpenter cannot help looking at a piece of wood
with a professional glance it is impossible to mistake--a glance that
seems to embrace at once its length, depth, thickness, toughness,
and general capabilities--so a painter views every object in nature,
animate or inanimate, as a subject for imitation and study of his art.
The heavens are not too high, the sea too deep, nor the desert too
wide to afford him a lesson; and the human countenance, with its
endless variety of feature and expression, is a book he never wearies
of learning by heart. When his professional interest in beauty is
enhanced by warmer feelings, it may be imagined that vanity could
require no fuller tribute of admiration than the worship of one whose
special gift it is to decide on the symmetry of outward form.

As a painter, Simon Perkins approved of Nina Algernon--as a man he
loved her. Lest his position should not prove sufficiently fatal, she
had become of late practically identified with his art, almost as
completely as she was mixed up with his every-day life. For many
months, perhaps even for years, the germ of a great work had taken
root in his imagination. Slowly, almost painfully, that germ developed
itself, passing through several stages, sketch upon sketch, till it
came to maturity at last in the composition of a large picture on
which he was now employed.

The subject afforded ample scope for liberty of fancy in form and
grouping--for the indulgence of a gorgeous taste in colouring and
costume. It represented Thomas the Rhymer in Fairyland, at the moment
when its glamour is falling from his eyes, when its magic lustre is
dying out on all that glittering pageantry and the elfin is fading to
a gnome. The handsome wizard turns from a crowd of phantom shapes,
half lovely, half grotesque--for their change is even now in
progress--to look wistfully and appealingly on the queen.

There is a pained expression in his comely features, of hurt
affection, and trust betrayed, yet not without a ray of pride and
triumph, that, come what might to the others, she is still unchanged.
Around him the fairies are shedding their glory as trees in autumn
shed their leaves. Here a sweet laughing face surmounts the hideous
body of an imp, there the bright scales of an unearthly armour shrivel
to rottenness and dust. The dazzling robes are turning blank and
colourless, the emerald rays waning to a pale, sad light, the flas