card-board, and began to sketch the scene where the homeless beauty,
with her naked boy, is standing at the gate of the convent, surrounded
by the staring nuns, whose looks and attitudes express doubt and
suspicion. Felix threw himself on his couch again, and lay smoking,
rarely throwing in a word, as he watched every movement of the other's
hand. The proximity of this man, who was self-reliant, so humble, and
yet so constantly striving at some lofty aim, exercised a singularly
soothing influence upon Felix's restless soul. He confessed this, when
Kohle began to express surprise that any one should leave the town,
head over heels in this way, and rush into the country, in order, when
he arrived there, to shut himself up in a sunless garret room, and look
on while a man painfully trundled his barrow over a hard road, toward a
goal of art which is generally supposed to have long since been left
behind.

"My dear Kohle," he said, "only let me stay here. I should like very
much to learn something from you which would be of more benefit to me
than a walk or a bath in the lake--namely, your art of knowing just
what you want, and of wanting nothing which you cannot have. Was this
art born in you, or have you gradually acquired it, and paid your
instruction-fee for it, as for other arts?'

"The best part of it is inborn," answered Kohle, quietly going on with
his sketching. "You must know that I came into this world as poor as a
church-mouse, and endowed with so small a proportion of all the goods
and gifts that fall to the share of so-called fortunate mortals, the
first-born and favorite children of Mother Nature, that, in my boyhood,
I had little pleasure in life, and would have parted with it very
cheaply. But then I discovered that I possessed something which
out-weighed all the glittering treasures in the world--such as beauty,
wealth, wit, or great intellect. I mean the ability to dream with my
eyes wide open, and to interpret my dreams for myself. The actual
world, with its joys and splendors, was as good as closed against a
poor devil like myself. How could such a wretched creature as this
Philip Emanuel Kohle, this lean, yellow ragamuffin in poor clothes, who
stumbled awkwardly through the world, and who could neither fascinate
women nor impress men, have the impudence to take his place at the
bounteous table at which the children of fortune felt at home? So I
held myself aloof, and earnestly and zealously set to wo