e various parts of your lecture for you,"
said Greenleaf. "You think I see Nature in her gentler moods, and
reproduce only her placid features. You think I have feeling, though
latent,--undeveloped. My nerves need a banging, just enough not to
wholly unstring them. For that pleasant experience, I am to fall in
love. The woman who has the nature to magnetize, overpower, transport me
is Miss Marcia Sandford. I am, therefore, to make myself as
uncomfortable as possible, in pursuit of a pleasure I know beforehand I
can never obtain. Then, from the rather prosaic level of Scumble, I
shall rise to the grand, gloomy, and melodramatic style of Salvator
Rosa. _Voila tout!_

"An admirable summary. You have listened well. But tell me now,--what do
_you_ think? Or do you wander like a little brook, without any will of
your own, between such banks as Fate may hem you in withal?"

"I will be frank with you. Until last season, I never had a serious,
definite purpose in life. I fell in love then with the most charming of
country-girls."

"I know," interrupted Easelmann, in a denser cloud than usual,--"a
village Lucy,--'a violet 'neath a mossy stone, fair as a star when only
one,'--you know the rest of it. She was fair because there _was_ only
one."

"Silence, Mephistopheles! it is my turn; let me finish my story. I never
told her my love"----

"'But let concealment'"----

"Attend to your pipe; it is going out. I did _look_, however. The
language of the eyes needs no translation. I often walked, sketched,
talked with the girl, and I felt that there was the completest sympathy
between us. I knew her feelings towards me, as well, I am persuaded, as
she knew mine. I gave her no pledge, no keepsake; I only managed, by an
artifice, to get her daguerreotype at a travelling saloon."

Easelmann laughed. "Let me see it, most modest of lovers!"

"You sha'n't. Your evil eye shall not fall upon it After I came to
Boston, I took a room and began working up my sketches"----

"Where I found you brushing away for dear life."

"I meant to earn enough to go abroad, if it were only for one look at
the great pictures of which I have so often dreamed. Then I meant to
come back"----

"To find your Lucy married to a schoolmaster, and with five sickly
children."

"No,--she is but seventeen; she will not marry till I see her."

"I admire your confidence, Greenleaf; it is an amiable weakness."

"After I had been here a month or two, I was fille