us if we smiled not as we
passed by! Alas for us if, face to face, at last, with our Elder Brother,
we find ourselves saying, "Lord, when saw we thee sick and in prison!"

A Companion for the Winter.

I have engaged a companion for the winter. It would be simply a
superfluous egotism to say this to the public, except that I have a
philanthropic motive for doing so. There are many lonely people who are in
need of a companion possessing just such qualities as his; and he has
brothers singularly like himself, whose services can be secured. I despair
of doing justice to him by any description. In fact, thus far, I discover
new perfections in him daily, and believe that I am yet only on the
threshold of our friendship.

In conversation he is more suggestive than any person I have ever known.
After two or three hours alone with him, I am sometimes almost startled to
look back and see through what a marvellous train of fancy and reflection
he has led me. Yet he is never wordy, and often conveys his subtlest
meaning by a look.

He is an artist, too, of the rarest sort. You watch the process under
which his pictures grow with incredulous wonder. The Eastern magic which
drops the seed in the mould, and bids it shoot up before your eyes,
blossom, and bear its fruit in an hour, is tardy and clumsy by side of the
creative genius of my companion. His touch is swift as air; his coloring
is vivid as light; he has learned, I know not how, the secrets of hidden
places in all lands; and he paints, now a tufted clump of soft cocoa
palms; now the spires and walls of an iceberg, glittering in yellow
sunlight; now a desolate, sandy waste, where black rocks and a few
crumbling ruins are lit up by a lurid glow; then a cathedral front, with
carvings like lace; then the skeleton of a wrecked ship, with bare ribs
and broken masts,--and all so exact, so minute, so life-like, that you
believe no man could paint thus any thing which he had not seen.

He has a special love for mosaics, and a marvellous faculty for making
drawings of curious old patterns. Nothing is too complicated for his
memory, and he revels in the most fantastic and intricate shapes. I have
known him in a single evening throw off a score of designs, all beautiful,
and many of them rare: fiery scorpions on a black ground; pale lavender
filagrees over scarlet; white and black squares blocked out as for tiles
of a pavement, and crimson and yellow threads interlaced over