ung body there was an energy, a gallantry, a joy of life,
that arrested and challenged one.

"Yes, that's where I got the notion," Hartwell remarked, wandering
back to his seat in the window. "I've wanted to do it for years, but
I've never felt quite sure of myself. I was afraid of missing it. He
was an uncle of mine, my father's half-brother, and I was named for
him. He was killed in one of the big battles of Sixty-four, when I
was a child. I never saw him--never knew him until he had been dead
for twenty years. And then, one night, I came to know him as we
sometimes do living persons--intimately, in a single moment."

He paused to knock the ashes out of his short pipe, refilled it, and
puffed at it thoughtfully for a few moments with his hands on his
knees. Then, settling back heavily among the cushions and looking
absently out of the window, he began his story. As he proceeded
further and further into the experience which he was trying to
convey to us, his voice sank so low and was sometimes so charged
with feeling, that I almost thought he had forgotten our presence
and was remembering aloud. Even Bentley forgot his nervousness in
astonishment and sat breathless under the spell of the man's thus
breathing his memories out into the dusk.

"It was just fifteen years ago this last spring that I first went
home, and Bentley's having to cut away like this brings it all back
to me.

"I was born, you know, in Italy. My father was a sculptor, though I
dare say you've not heard of him. He was one of those first fellows
who went over after Story and Powers,--went to Italy for 'Art,'
quite simply; to lift from its native bough the willing, iridescent
bird. Their story is told, informingly enough, by some of those
ingenuous marble things at the Metropolitan. My father came over
some time before the outbreak of the Civil War, and was regarded as
a renegade by his family because he did not go home to enter the
army. His half-brother, the only child of my grandfather's second
marriage, enlisted at fifteen and was killed the next year. I was
ten years old when the news of his death reached us. My mother died
the following winter, and I was sent away to a Jesuit school, while
my father, already ill himself, stayed on at Rome, chipping away at
his Indian maidens and marble goddesses, still gloomily seeking the
thing for which he had made himself the most unhappy of exiles.

"He died when I was fourteen, but even before that I h