her,--I
think it was to ask some question about the tapestry. She looked at me
reproachfully, indignantly,--just as a child reciting the
multiplication-table before the School-Committee would look, if tripped
up between the numbers, or as a boy, taken advantage of in play, might
cry, "No fair!" She did not condescend to answer me, perhaps she could
not, but paused a moment, reflected, went deliberately back in her
recital, repeated the last few dates and phrases by way of gaining an
impetus, and then went on without faltering to the end of her prescribed
narration.

Poor child! She had my sympathy, and has still. What a grudge she must
owe us tourists, even the tamest and most submissive of us, for whom she
is thus compelled to tax her unwilling memory!

But if her spirits were damped, her good-humor threatened, it was for a
minute only. Upon completing our rapid survey of my lord's parlor, and
looking round for the guide who should conduct us farther, she had
become invisible. So we moved on without her, and commenced exploring a
narrow passage with a certain sense of bewilderment at its loneliness,
and the doubt whither it might lead, when, suddenly, we were startled by
a merry laugh, which seemed to ring through the air directly above our
heads. Was it a mocking spirit that haunted the place? or one of the old
figures on the tapestry, started into life? We looked up, and there, on
a rough platform of pine boards, projecting from the wall, stood our
Fenella. She was leaning over the shoulder of an artist-boy, who, seated
at his easel, was copying one of the Gorgon-heads that stood out on the
faded tapestry. She had dismissed us wholly from her thoughts, and,
giving play to her native fun and coquetry, was taunting the youth with
the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she
last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the
boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive
which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some
elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her
future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer
felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall,
and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring out in
fresh colors the staring eyes and mummied cheeks which would otherwise
soon be lost to memory. She certainly made the most of her oppo