toop with pain and difficulty, and try
in vain to pick them up.

Rembrandt married an ignorant peasant who had served him as cook,
thinking this a more economical alliance than one with a person of
refined mind and habits. He and his wife usually dined on brown
bread, salt herrings, and small beer. He occasionally took portraits
at a high price, and in this way became acquainted with the
Burgomaster Six, a man of enlarged mind and unblemished character,
who yet continued faithfully attached to the avaricious painter. His
friendship was sometimes put to a severe test by such occurrences as
the following:--

Rembrandt remarked one day that the price of his engravings had
fallen.

'You are insatiable,' said the burgomaster.

'Perhaps so. I cannot help thirsting for gold.'

'You are a miser.'

'True: and I shall be one all my life.'

''Tis really a pity,' remarked his friend, 'that you will not be
able after death to act as your own treasurer, for whenever that
event occurs, all your works will rise to treble their present
value.'

A bright idea struck Rembrandt. He returned home, went to bed,
desired his wife and his son Titus to scatter straw before the door,
and give out, first, that he was dangerously ill, and then
dead--while the simulated fever was to be of so dreadfully
infectious a nature that none of the neighbours were to be admitted
near the sick-room. These instructions were followed to the letter;
and the disconsolate widow proclaimed that, in order to procure
money for her husband's interment, she must sell all his works, any
property that he left not being available on so short a notice.

The unworthy trick succeeded. The sale, including every trivial
scrap of painting or engraving, realised an enormous sum, and
Rembrandt was in ecstasy. The honest burgomaster, however, was
nearly frightened into a fit of apoplexy at seeing the man whose
death he had sincerely mourned standing alive and well at the door
of his studio. Meinherr Six obliged him to promise that he would in
future abstain from such abominable deceptions. One day he was
employed in painting in a group the likenesses of the whole family
of a rich citizen. He had nearly finished it, when intelligence was
brought him of the death of a tame ape which he greatly loved. The
creature had fallen off the roof of the house into the street.
Without interrupting his work, Rembrandt burst into loud
lamentations, and after some time announced that