with maroon rep, it will make
such a pretty effect."

"Yes," said John; "and then, you know, our picture is so bright, it
will light up the whole. Everything depends on the picture."

Now as to "the picture," it has a story which must be told. John,
having been all his life a worshiper and adorer of beauty and
beautiful things, had never passed to or from his business without
stopping at the print-shop windows, and seeing a little of what was
there.

On one of these occasions he was smitten to the heart with the beauty
of an autumn landscape, where the red maples and sumachs, the purple
and crimson oaks, all stood swathed and harmonized together in the
hazy Indian summer atmosphere. There was a great yellow chestnut
tree, on a distant hill, which stood out so naturally that John
instinctively felt his fingers tingling for a basket, and his
heels alive with a desire to bound over on to the rustling hillside
and pick up the glossy brown nuts. Everything was there of autumn,
even to the goldenrod and purple asters and scarlet creepers in the
foreground.

John went in and inquired. It was by an unknown French artist, without
name or patrons, who had just come to our shores to study our scenery,
and this was the first picture he had exposed for sale. John had just
been paid a quarter's salary; he bethought him of board-bill and
washerwoman, sighed, and faintly offered fifty dollars.

To his surprise he was taken up at once, and the picture became his.
John thought himself dreaming. He examined his treasure over and over,
and felt sure that it was the work of no amateur beginner, but of a
trained hand and a true artist soul. So he found his way to the studio
of the stranger, and apologized for having got such a gem for so much
less than its worth. "It was all I could give, though," he said; "and
one who paid four times as much could not value it more." And so John
took one and another of his friends, with longer purses than his own,
to the studio of the modest stranger; and now his pieces command their
full worth in the market, and he works with orders far ahead of his
ability to execute, giving to the canvas the trails of American
scenery as appreciated and felt by the subtile delicacy of the French
mind,--our rural summer views, our autumn glories, and the dreamy,
misty delicacy of our snowy winter landscapes. Whoso would know the
truth of the same, let him inquire for the modest studio of
Morvillier, at Maiden, scar