background--"and turn your head this way, looking at me." The artist
began to draw, and every time he gave a quick glance upwards from his
book, there were the wistful face and those eyes. "Confound it! I beg
your pardon-the light. Will you please turn your eyes a little off, that
way-so." There was no reason why the artist should be nervous, the face
was perfectly demure; but the fact is that art will have only one
mistress. So the drawing limped on from day to day, and the excursions
became a matter of course. Sometimes the party drove, extending their
explorations miles among the hills, exhilarated by the sparkling air,
excited by the succession of lovely changing prospects, bestowing their
compassion upon the summer boarders in the smartly painted
boarding-houses, and comparing the other big hotels with their own. They
couldn't help looking down on the summer boarders, any more than
cottagers at other places can help a feeling of superiority to people in
hotels. It is a natural desire to make an aristocratic line somewhere.
Of course they saw the Kaaterskill Falls, and bought twenty-five cents'
worth of water to pour over them, and they came very near seeing the
Haines Falls, but were a little too late.
"Have the falls been taken in today?" asked Marion, seriously.
"I'm real sorry, miss," said the proprietor, "but there's just been a
party here and taken the water. But you can go down and look if you want
to, and it won't cost you a cent."
They went down, and saw where the falls ought to be. The artist said it
was a sort of dry-plate process, to be developed in the mind afterwards;
Mr. King likened it to a dry smoke without lighting the cigar; and the
doctor said it certainly had the sanitary advantage of not being damp.
The party even penetrated the Platerskill Cove, and were well rewarded by
its exceeding beauty, as is every one who goes there. There are sketches
of all these lovely places in a certain artist's book, all looking,
however, very much alike, and consisting principally of a graceful figure
in a great variety of unstudied attitudes.
"Isn't this a nervous sort of a place?" the artist asked his friend, as
they sat in his chamber overlooking the world.
"Perhaps it is. I have a fancy that some people are born to enjoy the
valley, and some the mountains."
"I think it makes a person nervous to live on a high place. This feeling
of constant elevation tires one; it gives a fellow no such sense of
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