verlasting beauty in her
who was their image! But they have wantonly destroyed their own
masterpiece, have crushed the scarce-opened bud, have darkened the star
ere it has risen! If a man had done it, Melissa, a man what would his
doom have been! If he--"

Here the youth hid his face in his hands in passionate emotion; but,
feeling his sister's arm round his shoulder, he recovered himself, and
went on more calmly: "Well, you heard that she was dead. She was of just
your age; she is dead at eighteen, and her father commissioned me to
paint her in death.--Pour me out some water; then I will proceed as
coldly as a man crying the description of a runaway slave." He drank a
deep draught, and wandered restlessly up and down in front of his sister,
while he told her all that had happened to him during the last few days.

The day before yesterday, at noon, he had left the inn where he had been
carousing with friends, gay and careless, and had obeyed the call of
Seleukus. Just before raising the knocker he had been singing cheerfully
to himself. Never had he felt more fully content--the gayest of the gay.
One of the first men in the town, and a connoisseur, had honored him with
a fine commission, and the prospect of painting something dead had
pleased him. His old master had often admired the exquisite delicacy of
the flesh-tones of a recently deceased body. As his glance fell on the
implements that his slave carried after him, he had drawn himself up with
the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he felt
equal. Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him,
and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent
permission to step in, he had already become more serious.

He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen
that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular
thing among the various objects worthy of admiration. For already in the
anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him. The large halls, which
were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the
grave. And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining
bril