stood a rickety office-stool. On the platform for sitters a modern easy
chair, with the cover in tatters, invited all models to picturesque
repose. Close to the rosewood table was placed a rocking-chair, and
between the legs of the deal table were huddled together a camp-stool
and a hassock. In short, every remarkable variety of the illustrious
family of Seats was represented in one corner or another of Mr. Blyth's
painting-room.

All the surplus small articles which shelves, tables, and chairs were
unable to accommodate, reposed in comfortable confusion on the floor.
One half at least of a pack of cards seemed to be scattered about in
this way. A shirt-collar, three gloves, a boot, a shoe, and half a
slipper; a silk stocking, and a pair of worsted muffetees; three
old play-bills rolled into a ball; a pencil-case, a paper-knife, a
tooth-powder-box without a lid, and a superannuated black-beetle trap
turned bottom upwards, assisted in forming part of the heterogeneous
collection of rubbish strewed about the studio floor. And worse than
all--as tending to show that the painter absolutely enjoyed his own
disorderly habits--Mr. Blyth had jocosely desecrated his art, by making
it imitate litter where, in all conscience, there was real litter enough
already. Just in the way of anybody entering the room, he had painted,
on the bare floor, exact representations of a new quill pen and a very
expensive-looking sable brush, lying all ready to be trodden upon by
entering feet. Fresh visitors constantly attested the skillfulness of
these imitations by involuntarily stooping to pick up the illusive pen
and brush; Mr. Blyth always enjoying the discomfiture and astonishment
of every new victim, as thoroughly as if the practical joke had been a
perfectly new one on each successive occasion.

Such was the interior condition of the painting-room, after the owner
had inhabited it for a period of little more than two months!

The church-clock of the suburb has just struck ten, when quick, light
steps approach the studio door. A gentleman enters--trips gaily over the
imitative pen and brush--and, walking up to the fire, begins to warm his
back at it, looking about him rather absently, and whistling "Drops of
Brandy" in the minor key. This gentleman is Mr. Valentine Blyth.

He looks under forty, but is really a little over fifty. His face is
round and rosy, and not marked by a single wrinkle in any part of it.
He has large, sparkling black