sic was
brought from the city, all the availables of the family were to be found
in garden, closet, house-top, conning hieroglyphical pages, and the
whole chaotic confusion takes final shape and resolves into a little
Spanish Masque, to which kings and queens have once listened in courtly
state, and which now unrolls its resplendent pageant before the eyes
of Mrs. Laudersdale, translating her, as it were, into another planet,
where familiar faces in pompous entablature look out upon her from a
whirl of light and color, and familiar voices utter stately sentences
in some honeyed unknown tongue. And finally, when the glittering parade
finishes, and the strange groups, in their costly raiment, throng out
for dancing, she herself gives her hand to some Prince of the pageantry,
who does her homage, and, sealing the fact of her restoration, swims
once round the room in a mist of harmony, and afterward sits by his
side, captive to his will, and subject to his enchantment, while

"All night had the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon,
All night had the casement jessamine stirred
With the dancers dancing in tune,
Till a silence fell with the waking bird
And a hush with the setting moon."

This little episode of illness and recovery having been thus duly
celebrated, the masqueraders again forswore roofs and spent long days in
distant junketing throughout the woods; the horses, too, were brought
into requisition, and a flock of boats kept forever on the wing. And
meanwhile, as Helen Heath said,--she then least of all comprehending the
real drama of that summer,--Mrs. Laudersdale had taught them how the
Greek animated his statue.

"And how was that?" asked Mr. Raleigh.

"He took it out-doors, I fancy, and called the winds to curl about it.
He set its feet in morning-dew, he let in light and shade through green
dancing leaves above it, he gave it glimpses of moon and star, he taught
the forest-birds to chirp and whistle in its ear, and finally he steeped
it in sunshine."

"Sunshine, then, was the vivifying stroke?"

Helen nodded.

"You are mistaken," said he; "the man never found a soul in his work
till he put his own there first."

"I always wonder," remarked Mrs. Laudersdale here, "that every artist,
in brooding over his marble, adding, touching, bringing out effects,
does not end by loving it,--absorbingly, because so beautiful to
him,--despairingly, because to him forever silent."

"You needn't wonde