your baronial ancestors can turn in their graves
at it as they please."

"Chaff away, dear old Hans!" cried the young man, joyously. "Now I'll
stake my head that I will become a famous artist just to have the laugh
on you! I will work from morning till night with a true malicious
pleasure, grinding and fretting till the dilettante skin is rubbed off
and something better appears below it. And you shall see that I have
not spent these seven years altogether in lounging. If you will run
through my sketch-books from both continents--but _apropos_, what have
you been doing in the mean while? Is it not a shame that I haven't been
able to keep track of your progress toward immortality, even by a
wretched photograph? And here I have been running on for an hour over
my own adventures, while the most glorious wonders of the world are
waiting for me over yonder!"

He strode quickly across the yard, to which they had come back while
they were talking, and entered the house.

"You will repent this haste, rash boy!" Jansen called after him, while
an odd smile played about his lips. "You will indeed wonder over much
that you see--but the wonders of the world that you dream of--they are
still in this narrow room" (he pointed to his forehead), "and even
there they are not always in the best light!"

With these words he unlocked one of the two lower doors, and let Felix
pass in.

It was a second studio, adjoining that in which he had worked during
the morning; a room precisely like the other, its walls painted in the
same stone-color, and its great square window half draped in the same
fashion. And yet no one would have believed that the same spirit ruled
here that had created the dancing Bacchante in the next atelier.

On slender pedestals stood a multitude of figures, most of them of half
life-size, such as are used for the decoration of Catholic churches,
chapels and cemeteries. Some of them were just begun, some were almost
finished works; and in all could be clearly recognized the hands of the
pupils who had their execution in charge--sometimes more and sometimes
less skillfully imitating the little original models, barely six inches
high, that stood on small shelves beside the copies. While the latter
were neatly cut in sandstone or in the cheaper marbles--and a few in
wood, decorated with all manner of painting and gilding--the little
models were in plaster, and spotted and nicked by constant use. Yet
these doll-like little