mended as studios to a city that loved not art. Here dwelt the
keeper and his kind-hearted little wife, and no one besides save Love
and Beauty. There was thus a feeling of rarefaction in the atmosphere,
as though at this height it was only the Alpine flora of humanity that
could find root and breathing. But once along the bare passage and
through a certain door, and what a sudden translation it was into a
gracious world of books and flowers and the peace they always bring.

Once upon a time, in that enchanted past where dwell all the dreams we
love best, precisely, with loving punctuality, at five in the afternoon,
a pretty, girlish figure, like Persephone escaping from the shades,
stole through the rough sailors at the foot of that sordid Jacob's
ladder and made her way to the little heaven at the top.

I shall not describe her, for the good reason that I cannot. Leonardo,
ever curious of the beauty that was most strangely exquisite, once in an
inspired hour painted such a face, a face wrought of the porcelain of
earth with the art of heaven. But, whoever should paint it, God
certainly made it--must have been the comment of any one who caught a
glimpse of that little figure vanishing heavenwards up that stair, like
an Assumption of Fra Angelico's--that is, any one interested in art and
angels.

She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who
had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her
skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock
had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood
of commission agents and shipbrokers stood silent together for a
moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire
could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had
written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was
not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
dashes like the fir