your skill; but I cannot help thinking
that, for the price of this picture of a family party, you might have
had--"

"What then?"

"The family itself, sir."

The old amateur cast a look at me, not of anger, but of contempt. In
his eyes I had evidently just proved myself a barbarian, incapable of
understanding the arts, and unworthy of enjoying them. He got up without
answering me, hastily took up the Jordaens, and replaced it in its
hiding-place behind the prints.

It was a sort of dismissal; I took leave of him, and went away.

Seven o'clock.--When I come in again, I find my water boiling over
my lamp, and I busy myself in grinding my Mocha, and setting out my
coffee-things.

The getting coffee ready is the most delicate and most attractive of
domestic operations to one who lives alone: it is the grand work of a
bachelor's housekeeping.

Coffee is, so to say, just the mid-point between bodily and spiritual
nourishment. It acts agreeably, and at the same time, upon the senses
and the thoughts. Its very fragrance gives a sort of delightful
activity to the wits; it is a genius that lends wings to our fancy, and
transports it to the land of the Arabian Nights.

When I am buried in my old easy-chair, my feet on the fender before a
blazing fire, my ear soothed by the singing of the coffee-pot, which
seems to gossip with my fire-irons, the sense of smell gently excited by
the aroma of the Arabian bean, and my eyes shaded by my cap pulled down
over them, it often seems as if each cloud of the fragrant steam took a
distinct form. As in the mirages of the desert, in each as it rises, I
see some image of which my mind had been longing for the reality.

At first the vapor increases, and its color deepens. I see a cottage
on a hillside: behind is a garden shut in by a whitethorn hedge, and
through the garden runs a brook, on the banks of which I hear the bees
humming.

Then the view opens still more. See those fields planted with
apple-trees, in which I can distinguish a plough and horses waiting for
their master! Farther on, in a part of the wood which rings with the
sound of the axe, I perceive the woodsman's hut, roofed with turf and
branches; and, in the midst of all these rural pictures, I seem to see a
figure of myself gliding about. It is my ghost walking in my dream!

The bubbling of the water, ready to boil over, compels me to break off
my meditations, in order to fill up the coffee-pot. I then remember
that