I believe his love for human creatures, and especially
within the family relation, were of that deep, still, yearning kind we
feel towards the woods and hills of home; the silent, unobtrusive
presence fills us with rest and certainty, and we are all unease when we
miss it; yet we take it for granted, and seldom dwell upon it in our
active thoughts, or realize the part it plays in us; it belongs to the
dark wells of being.

Dear, falling star of the northland,--so you have gone out, and--it was
not yet morning.

[Illustration]

FIFTY YEARS OF BAD LUCK.

By SADAKICHI HARTMANN.

EVERY occupant of the ramshackle, old-fashioned studio building on
Broadway knew old Melville, the landscape painter, who had roughed life
within its dilapidated walls for more than a score of years. In former
years the studio building had been quite fashionable and respectable;
there is hardly a painter of reputation in New York to-day who has not,
once in his life, occupied a room on the top floor. But in these days of
"modern improvements," of running water and steam heat, of elevators and
electric lights, it has lost its standing and is inhabited by a rather
precarious and suspicious clan of pseudo artists, mountebanks who
vegetate on the outskirts of art; "buckeye painters," who turn out a
dozen 20x30 canvases a day for the export trade to Africa and Australia;
unscrupulous fabricators of Corots and Daubignys, picture drummers who
make such rascality profitable, illustrators of advertising pamphlets,
and so-called frescoe painters, who ornament ceilings with sentimental
clouds, with two or three cupids thrown in according to the price they
extort from ignorant parvenues.

And yet, no matter on what by-roads these soldiers of fortune wandered
to earn their dubious livelihood, they all respected the white-bearded
tenant, in his shabby gray suit, a suit which he wore at all seasons,
and which time seemed to have treated just as unkindly as the bent and
emaciated form of its wearer. Old Melville gave offense to nobody, and
always had a pleasant word for everybody, but, as he was not talkative,
and the other tenants were too busy to bother an old man painting,
nobody knew much about his mode of living, the standard of his art, or
his past history.

Very few had ever entered his studio--he had neither patrons nor
intimate friends--and very likely they would not have enjoyed their
visit. A peculiar gloomy atmosphere pervaded the roo