old.
Mrs. Hudson, Rowland was sure, might be seen in the garden of a
morning, in a white apron and a pair of old gloves, engaged in frugal
horticulture. Roderick's studio was behind, in the basement; a large,
empty room, with the paper peeling off the walls. This represented, in
the fashion of fifty years ago, a series of small fantastic landscapes
of a hideous pattern, and the young sculptor had presumably torn it away
in great scraps, in moments of aesthetic exasperation. On a board in
a corner was a heap of clay, and on the floor, against the wall,
stood some dozen medallions, busts, and figures, in various stages of
completion. To exhibit them Roderick had to place them one by one on
the end of a long packing-box, which served as a pedestal. He did so
silently, making no explanations, and looking at them himself with a
strange air of quickened curiosity. Most of the things were portraits;
and the three at which he looked longest were finished busts. One was a
colossal head of a negro, tossed back, defiant, with distended nostrils;
one was the portrait of a young man whom Rowland immediately perceived,
by the resemblance, to be his deceased brother; the last represented a
gentleman with a pointed nose, a long, shaved upper lip, and a tuft on
the end of his chin. This was a face peculiarly unadapted to sculpture;
but as a piece of modeling it was the best, and it was admirable. It
reminded Rowland in its homely veracity, its artless artfulness, of
the works of the early Italian Renaissance. On the pedestal was cut
the name--Barnaby Striker, Esq. Rowland remembered that this was the
appellation of the legal luminary from whom his companion had undertaken
to borrow a reflected ray, and although in the bust there was naught
flagrantly set down in malice, it betrayed, comically to one who could
relish the secret, that the features of the original had often been
scanned with an irritated eye. Besides these there were several rough
studies of the nude, and two or three figures of a fanciful kind. The
most noticeable (and it had singular beauty) was a small modeled design
for a sepulchral monument; that, evidently, of Stephen Hudson. The young
soldier lay sleeping eternally, with his hand on his sword, like an old
crusader in a Gothic cathedral.

Rowland made no haste to pronounce; too much depended on his judgment.
"Upon my word," cried Hudson at last, "they seem to me very good."

And in truth, as Rowland looked, he saw t