e his burial-ground; walled it, and planted
it, and left special directions for his burial. The grave should be
deep, and the spades of resurrection-men disappointed by repeated layers
of straw, not easy to dig through. In the church-yard of Mansfield,
meantime, he found the grave of his parents, and honored it with an
inclosure of iron palisades.

He died. How? Not in travel; not in sailing over the ocean, nor up
tulip-margined rivers of Persia or Arabia Felix; nor yet in an
earthquake--but in the dream of one. One night he was heard crying in a
voice of horror, "There! there!--fly! fly!--the town shakes! the house
falls! Ha! the earth opens!--away!" Then the voice ceased; but in the
morning it was found that he had rolled out of bed, lodged between the
bedstead and the wall, and there, like a sandbag wedged in a windy
crevice, he was--dead!

There is, therefore, a dead Thompson in Sherwood Forest, where no
clergyman laid him, and yet he sleeps; and there is also a living
Thompson.

In the village of Edwinstowe, on the very verge of the beautiful old
Birkland, there stands a painter's house. In his little parlor you find
books, and water-color-paintings on the walls, which show that the
painter has read and looked about him in the world. And yet he is but a
house-painter, who owes his establishment here to his love of nature
rather than to his love of art. In the neighboring Dukery, some one of
the wealthy wanted a piece of oak-painting done; but he was dissatisfied
with the style in which painters now paint oak; a style very splendid,
but as much resembling genuine oak as a frying-pan resembles the moon.
Christopher Thompson determined to try _his_ hand; and for this purpose
he did not put himself to school to some great master of the art, who
had copied the copy of a hundred consecutive copies of a piece of oak,
till the thing produced was very fine, but like no wood that ever grew
or ever will grow. Christopher Thompson went to nature. He got a piece
of well-figured, real oak, well planed and polished, and copied it
precisely. When the different specimens of the different painters were
presented to the aforesaid party, he found only one specimen at all like
oak, and that was Thompson's. The whole crowd of master house-painters
were exasperated and amazed. Such a fellow preferred to them! No; they
were wrong; it was nature that was preferred.

Christopher Thompson was a self-taught painter. He had been tossed abo