orkshop,
nor even the witchcraft of a sunny shadow, that might have deluded
people's eyes as it flitted along the street. Captain Hunnewell, too,
had vanished. His hoarse sea-breezy tones, however, were audible on the
other side of a door that opened upon the water.

"Sit down in the stern sheets, my lady," said the gallant captain.
"Come, bear a hand, you lubbers, and set us on board in the turning of
a minute-glass."

And then was heard the stroke of oars.

"Drowne," said Copley with a smile of intelligence, "you have been a
truly fortunate man. What painter or statuary ever had such a subject!
No wonder that she inspired a genius into you, and first created the
artist who afterwards created her image."

Drowne looked at him with a visage that bore the traces of tears, but
from which the light of imagination and sensibility, so recently
illuminating it, had departed. He was again the mechanical carver that
he had been known to be all his lifetime.

"I hardly understand what you mean, Mr. Copley," said he, putting his
hand to his brow. "This image! Can it have been my work? Well, I have
wrought it in a kind of dream; and now that I am broad awake I must set
about finishing yonder figure of Admiral Vernon."

And forthwith he employed himself on the stolid countenance of one of
his wooden progeny, and completed it in his own mechanical style, from
which he was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed his
business industriously for many years, acquired a competence, and in
the latter part of his life attained to a dignified station in the
church, being remembered in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne,
the carver. One of his productions, an Indian chief, gilded all over,
stood during the better part of a century on the cupola of the Province
House, bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of
the sun. Another work of the good deacon's hand--a reduced likeness of
his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quadrant--may be
seen to this day, at the corner of Broad and State streets, serving in
the useful capacity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker.
We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old
figure, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady,
unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is
imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to
circumstances, may either be developed in this world,