Mr. Cornelius McFudd respectively requests the pleasure of your presence at an informal wake to be held in honor of a double-breasted overcoat, London cut. The body and tail will be the ducks, and the two sleeves and velvet collar the Burgundy.

Riley's: 8 p.m. Third floor back.

The following week he packed his two tin boxes, boarded the Scotia, and sailed for home.

The keystone having dropped out, it was not long before the balance of the structure came down about the ears of the members. My Lord Cockburn the following week was ordered South by the bank to look after some securities locked up in a vault in a Georgia trust company, and which required a special messenger to recover them—the growing uneasiness in mercantile circles over the political outlook of the country having assumed a serious aspect. Cockburn had to swim rivers, he wrote Oliver in his first letter, and cross mountains on horseback, and sleep in a negro hut, besides having a variety of other experiences, to say nothing of several hair-breadth escapes, none of which availed him, as he returned home after all, without the bonds.

These financial straws, indicating the direction and force of the coming political winds, began to accumulate. The lull before the hurricane—the stagnation in commercial circles—became so ominous that soon the outside members and guests of the club ceased coming, being diligently occupied in earning their bread, and then Simmons sent the piano home —it had been loaned to him by reason of his profession and position—and only Fog-horn Cranch, Waller, Fred, Oliver, and Ruffle-shirt Tomlins were left. Alter a while, Waller gave up his room and slept in his studio and got his meals at the St. Clair, or went without them, so light, by reason of the hard times, was the demand for sheep pictures of Waller's particular make. And later on Tomlins went abroad, and Cranch moved West. And so the ruin of the club was complete; and so, too, this merry band of roysterers, with one or two exceptions, passes out of those pages.

Dear boys of the long ago, what has become of you all since those old days in that garret-room on Union Square? Tomlins, I know, turned up in Australia, where he married a very rich and very lovely woman, because he distinctly stated both of those facts in an exuberant letter to Oliver when he invited him to the wedding. "Not a bad journey—only a step, my dear Ollie, and we shall be so delighted to see you." I know this, to be true, for Oliver showed me the letter. Bowdoin went to Paris, where, as we all remember, he had a swell studio opening on to a garden, somewhere near the Arc de Triomphe, and had carriages stop at his door, and a butler to open it, and two maids in white caps to help the ladies off with their wraps. Poor Cranch died in Montana while hunting for gold, and my Lord Cockburn went back to London.

But does anybody know what has become of McFudd—irresistible, irresponsible, altogether delightful McFudd? that condensation of all that was joyous, rollicking, and spontaneous; that devotee of the tub and pink of neatness, immaculate, clean- shaven and well-groomed; that soul of good-nature, which no number of flowing bowls could disturb nor succeeding headaches dull; that most generous of souls, whose first impulse was to cut squarely in half everything he owned and give you your choice of the pieces, and who never lost his temper until you refused them both. If you, my dear boy, are still wandering about this earth, and your eye should happen to fall on these pages, remember, I send you my greeting. If you have been sent for, and have gone aloft to cheer those others who have gone before, and who could spare you no longer, speak a good word for me, please, and then, perhaps, I may shake your hand again.

With the dissolution of the happy coterie there came to Oliver many a lonely night under the cheap lamp, the desolate hall outside looking all the more desolate and uninviting with the piano gone and the lights extinguished.

Yet these nights were not altogether distasteful to Oliver. Fred had noticed for months that his room-mate no longer entered into the frolics of the club with the zest and vim that characterized the earlier days of the young Southerner's sojourn among them. Our hero had said nothing while the men had held together, and to all outward appearances had done his share not only with his singing, but in any other way in which he could help on the merriment. He had covered the space allotted to him on the walls with caricatures of the several boarders below. He had mixed the salad at Riley's the night of McFudd's farewell supper, with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the cook's cap on his head. He had lined up with the others at Brown's on the Bowery; drank his "crystal cocktails" —the mildest of beverages—and had solemnly marched out again with his comrades in a lock-step like a gang of convicts. He had indulged in forty- cent opera, leaning over the iron railing of the top row of the Academy of Music, and had finished the evening at Pfaff's, drinking beer and munching hardtack and pickles, and had laughed and sung in a dozen other equally absurd escapades. And yet it was as plain as daylight to Fred that Oliver's heart was no longer centred in the life about him.

The fact is, the scribe is compelled to admit, the life indulged in by these merry bohemians had begun to pall upon this most sensitive of young gentlemen. It really had not satisfied him at all. This was not the sort of life that Mr. Crocker meant, he had said to himself after a night at Riley's when Cranch had sounded his horn so loud that the proprietor had threatened to turn the whole party into the street. Mr. Crocker's temperament was too restful to be interested in such performances. As for himself, he was tired of it.

Nothing of all this did he keep from his mother. The record of his likes and dislikes which formed the subject-matter of his daily letters was an absorbing study with her, and she let no variation of the weather-vane of his tastes escape her. Nor did she keep their contents from her intimate friends. She had read to Colonel Clayton one of his earlier ones, in which he had told her of the concerts and of the way Cockburn had served the brew that McFudd had concocted, and had shown him an illustration Oliver had drawn on the margin of the sheet—an outline of the china mug that held the mixture—to which that Chesterfield of a Clayton had replied:

"What did I tell you, madame—just what I expected of those Yankees—punch from mugs! Bah!"

She had, too, talked their contents over with Amos Cobb, who, since the confidence reposed in him by the Horn family, had become a frequent visitor at the house.

"There's no harm come to him yet, madame, or he wouldn't write you of what he does. Boys will be boys. Let him have his fling," the Vermonter had replied with a gleam of pleasure in his eye. "If he has the stuff in him that I think he has, he will swim out and get to higher ground; if he hasn't, better let him drown early. It will give everybody less trouble."

The dear lady had lost no sleep over these escapades. She, too, realized that as long as Oliver poured out his heart unreservedly to her there was little to fear. In her efforts to cheer him she had sought, in her almost daily letters sent him in return, to lead his thoughts into other channels. She knew how fond he had always been of the society of women, and how necessary they were to his happiness, and she begged him to go out more. "Surely there must be some young girls in so great a city who can help to make your life happier," she wrote.

In accordance with her suggestions, he had at last put on his best clothes and had accompanied Tomlins and Fred to some very delightful houses away up in Thirty-third Street, and another on Washington Square, and still another near St. Mark's Place, where his personality and his sweet, sympathetic voice had gained him friends and most pressing invitations to call again. Some he had accepted, and some he had not—it depended very largely on his mood and upon the people whom he met. If they reminded him in any way, either in manners or appointments, of his life at home, he went again—if not, he generally stayed away.

Among these was the house of his employer, Mr. Slade, who had treated him with marked kindness, not only inviting him to his own house, but introducing him to many of his friends—an unusual civility Oliver discovered afterward—not many of the clerks being given a seat at Mr. Slade's table. "I like his brusque, hearty manner," Oliver wrote to his mother after the first visit. "His wife is a charming woman, and so are the two daughters, quite independent and fearless, and entirely different from the girls at home, but most interesting and so well bred."

Another incident, too, had greatly pleased not only Oliver and his mother, but Richard as well. It happened that a consignment of goods belonging to Morton, Slade & Co. was stored in a warehouse in Charleston, and it became necessary to send one of the clerks South to reship or sell them, the ordinary business methods being unsafe, owing to the continued rumblings of the now rapidly approaching political storm—a storm that promised to be infinitely more serious than the financial stringency. The choice had fallen on Oliver, he being a Southerner, and knowing the ways of the people. He had advised with his mother and stood ready to leave at an hour's notice, when Mr. Slade's heart failed him.

"It's too dangerous, my lad," he said to Oliver. "I could trust you, I know, and I believe you would return safely and bring the goods or the money with you, but I should never forgive myself if anything should happen to you. I will send an older man." And he did.

It was at this time that Oliver had received Cockburn's letter telling him of his own experiences, and he, therefore, knew something of the risks a man would run, and could appreciate Mr. Slade's action all the more. Richard, as soon as he heard of it, had put down his tools, left his work-bench, and had gone into his library, where he had written the firm a letter of thanks, couched in terms so quaint and courtly, and so full of generous appreciation of their interest in Oliver, that Mr. Slade, equally appreciative, had worn it into ribbons in showing it to his friends as a model of style and chirography.

Remembering his mother's wishes, and in appreciation of his employer's courtesy, he had kept up this intimacy with the Slade family until an unfortunate catastrophe had occurred, which while it did not affect his welcome at their house, ruined his pleasure while there.

Mr. Slade had invited Oliver to dinner one rainy night, and, being too poor to pay for a cab, Oliver, in attempting to cross Broadway, had stepped into a mud-puddle a foot deep. He must either walk back and change his shoes and be late for dinner—an unpardonable offence—or he must keep on and run his chances of cleaning them in the dressing-room. There was no dressing-room available, as it turned out, and the fat English butler had to bring a wet cloth out into the hall (oh! how he wished for Malachi!) and get down on his stiff knees and wipe away vigorously before Oliver could present himself before his hostess, the dinner in the meantime getting cold and the guests being kept waiting. Oliver could never look at those shoes after that without shivering.

This incident had kept him at home for a time and had made him chary of exposing himself to similar mortifications. His stock of clothes at best was limited—especially his shoes—and as the weather continued bad and the streets impassable, he preferred waiting for clearer skies and safer walking. So he spent his nights in his room, crooning over the coke fire with Fred, or all alone if Fred were at the Academy, drawing from the cast.

On these nights he would begin to long for Kennedy Square. He had said nothing yet about returning, even for a day's visit. He knew how his mother felt about it, and he knew how he had seen her struggle to keep the interest paid up on the mortgage and to meet the daily necessities of the house. The motor was still incomplete, she wrote him, and success was as far off as ever. The mortgage had again been extended and the note renewed—this time for a longer term, owing to some friend's interest in the matter whose name she could not learn. She, therefore, felt no uneasiness on that score, although there were still no pennies which could be spared for Olivers travelling expenses, even if he could get leave of absence from his employers.

At these times, as he sat alone in his garret-room, Malachi's chuckle, without cause or reminder would suddenly ring in his ears, or some low strain from his father's violin or a soft note from Nathan's flute would float through his brain. "Dear Uncle Nat," he would break out, speaking aloud and springing from his chair—"I wish I could hear you tonight."

His only relief while in these moods was to again seize his pen and pour out his heart to his mother or to his father, or to Miss Clendenning or old Mr. Crocker. Occasionally he would write to Sue—not often—for that volatile young lady had so far forgotten Oliver as to leave his letters unanswered for weeks at a time. She was singing "Dixie," she told him in her last billet-doux, now a month old, and wondering whether Oliver was getting to be a Yankee, and whether he would be coming home with a high collar and his hair cut short and parted in the middle.

His father's letters in return did not lessen his gloom. "These agitators will destroy the country, my son, if they keep on," Richard had written in his last letter. "It is a sin against civilization to hold your fellow-men in bondage, and that is why years ago I gave Malachi and Hannah and the others their freedom, but Virginia has unquestionably the right to govern her internal affairs without consulting Massachusetts, and that is what many of these Northern leaders do not or will not understand. I am greatly disturbed over the situation, and I sincerely hope your own career will not be affected by these troubles. As to my own affairs, all I can say is that I work early and late, and am out of debt." Poor fellow! He thought he was.

Oliver was sitting thus one night, his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, gazing into the smouldering coals of his grate, his favorite attitude when his mind was troubled, when Fred, his face aglow, his big blue eyes dancing, threw wide the door and bounded in, bringing in his clothes the fresh, cool air of the night. He had been at work in the School of the Academy of Design, and had a drawing in chalk under his arm—a head of the young Augustus.

"What's the matter, Ollie, got the blues?"

"No, Freddie, only thinking."

"What's her name? I'll go and see her and make it up. Out with it—do I know her?"

Oliver smiled faintly, examined the drawing for a moment, and handing it back to Fred, said, sadly, "It's not a girl, Freddie, but I don't seem to get anywhere."

Fred threw the drawing on the bed and squeezed himself into the chair beside his chum, his arm around his neck.

"Where do you want to get, old man? What's the matter—any trouble at the store?"

"No—none that I know of. But the life is so monotonous, Fred. You do what you love to do. I mark boxes all day till lunch-time, then I roll them out on the sidewalk and make out dray tickets till I come home. I've been doing that all winter; I expect to be doing it for years. That don't get me anywhere, does it? I hate the life more and more every day."

(Was our hero's old love of change again asserting itself, or was it only the pinching of that Chinese shoe which his mother in her anxiety had slipped on his unresisting foot, and which he was still wearing to please her? Or was it the upper pressure of some inherent talent—some gift of his ancestors that would not down at his own bidding or that of his mother or anybody else's?)

"Somebody's got to do it, Ollie, and you are the last man hired," remarked Fred, quietly. "What would you like to do?"

Oliver shifted himself in the crowded chair until he could look into his room-mate's eyes.

"Fred, old man," he answered, his voice choking, "I haven't said a word to you about it all the time I've been here, for I don't like to talk about a thing that hurts me, and so I've kept it to myself. Now I'll tell you the truth just as it is. I don't want Mr. Slade's work nor anybody else's work. I don't like business and never will. I want to paint, and I'll never be happy until I do. That's it, fair and square."

"Well, quit Slade, then, and come with me."

"I would if it wasn't for mother. I promised her I would see this through, and I will." As he spoke the overdue mortgage and his mother's efforts to keep the interest paid passed in review before him.

Fred caught his breath. It astonished him, independent young Northerner as he was, to hear a full- grown man confess that his mother's' apron-strings still held him up, but he made no comment.

"Why not try both?" he cried. "There's a place in the school alongside of me—we'll work together nights. It won't interfere with what you do downtown. You'll get a good start, and when you have a day off in the summer you can do some out-door work. Waller has told me a dozen times that you draw better than he did when he commenced. Come along with me."

This conversation, with the other incidents of the day, or rather that part of it which had reference to the Academy, was duly set forth in his next letter to his mother—not as an argument to gain her consent to his studying with Fred, for he knew it was the last thing she would agree to—but because it was his habit to tell her everything. It would show her, too, how good a fellow Fred was and what an interest he took in his welfare. Her answer, three days later, sent him bounding upstairs and into their room like a whirlwind.

"Read, Fred, read!" he cried. "I can go. Mother says she thinks it would be the best thing in the world for me. Here, clap your eyes on that—" and Oliver held the letter out to Fred, his finger pointing to this passage: "I wish you would join Fred at the Academy. Now that you have a regular business that occupies your mind, and are earning your living, I have no objection to your studying drawing or learning any other accomplishment. You work hard all day, and this will rest you."

The cramped foot was beginning to spread! The Chinese shoe had lost its top button.



CHAPTER XII

AROUND THE MILO



Still another new and far more bewildering world was opened to Oliver the night that he entered the cast-room of the School of the National Academy of Design and took his seat among the students.

The title of the institution, high-sounding as it was, not only truthfully expressed the objects and purposes of its founders, but was wofully exact in the sense of its being national; for outside the bare walls of these rooms there was hardly a student's easel to be found the country over.

And such forlorn, desolate rooms; up two flights of dusty stairs, in a rickety, dingy loft off Broadway, within a short walk of Union Square—an auction- room on the ground floor and a bar-room in the rear. The largest of these rooms was used for the annual exhibition of the Academicians and their associates, and the smaller ones were given over to the students; one, a better lighted apartment, being filled with the usual collection of casts—the Milo, the Fighting Gladiator, Apollo Belvidere, Venus de Medici, etc., etc.; the other being devoted to the uses of the life-class and its models. Not the nude. Whatever may have been clone in the studios, in the class-room it was always the draped model that posed —the old woman who washed for a living on the top floor, or one of her chubby children or buxom daughters, or perhaps the peddler who strayed in to sell his wares and left his head behind him on ten different canvases and in as many different positions.

The casts themselves were backed up against the walls; some facing the windows for lights and darks, and others pushed toward the middle of the room, where the glow of the gas-jets could accentuate their better points. The Milo, by right of divinity, held the centre position—she being beautiful from any point of sight and available from any side. The Theseus and the Gladiator stood in the corners, affording space for the stools of two or three students and their necessary easels. Scattered about on the coarse, whitewashed walls were hung the smaller life-casts; fragments of the body—an arm, leg, or hand, or sections of a head—and tucked in between could be found cheap lithographic productions of the work of the students and professors of the Paris and Dusseldorf schools. The gas-lights under which the students worked at night were hooded by cheap paper shades of the students' own fashioning, and the lower sashes of the windows were smeared with whitewash or covered with newspapers to concentrate the light. During working hours the drawing-boards were propped upon rude easels or slanted on overturned chairs, the students sitting on three-legged stools.

A gentle-voiced, earnest, whole-souled old man— the one only instructor—presided over this temple of art. He had devoted his whole life to the sowing of figs and the reaping of thistles, and in his old age was just beginning to see the shoots of a new art forcing their way through the quickening clay of American civilization. Once in awhile, as assistants in this almost hopeless task, there would stray into his class-room some of the painters who, unconsciously, were founding a national art and in honor of whom a grateful nation will one day search the world over for marble white enough on which to perpetuate their memories: men as distinct in their aims, methods, and results as was that other group of unknown and despised immortals starving together at that very time in a French village across the sea—and men, too, equally deserving of the esteem and gratitude of their countrymen.

Oliver knew the names of these distinguished visitors to the Academy, as did all the other members of the Skylarks, and he knew their work. The pictures of George Inness, Sanford Gifford, Kensett, McEntee, Hart, Eastman Johnson, Hubbard, Church, Casilaer, Whittredge, and the others had been frequently discussed around the piano on the top floor at Miss Teetum's, and their merits and supposed demerits often hotly contested. He had met Kensett once at the house of Mr. Slade, and McEntee had been pointed out to him as he left the theatre one night, but few of the others had ever crossed his path.

Of the group Gifford appealed to him most. One golden "Venice" of the painter, which hung in a picture-store, always delighted him—a stretch of the Lagoon with a cluster of butterfly sails and a far- away line of palaces, towers, and domes lying like a string of pearls on the horizon. There was another of Kensett's, a point of rocks thrust out like a mailed hand into a blue sea; and a McEntee of October woods, all brown and gold; but the Gifford he had never forgotten; nor will anyone else who has seen it.

No wonder then that all his life he remembered that particular night, when a slender, dark-haired man in loose gray clothes sauntered into the class- room and moved around among the easels, giving a suggestion here and a word of praise there, for that was the night on which Professor Cummings touched our young hero's shoulder and said: "Mr. Gifford likes your drawing very much, Mr. Horn"—a word of praise which, as he wrote to Crocker, steadied his uncertain fingers "as nothing else had ever done."

The students in his school were from all stations in life: young and old; all of them poor, and most of them struggling along in kindred professions and occupations—engravers, house-painters, lithographers, and wood-carvers. Two or three were sign- painters. One of these—a big-boned, blue-eyed young follow, who drew in charcoal from the cast at night, and who sketched the ships in the harbor during the day—came from Kennedy Square, or rather from one of the side streets leading out of it. There can still be found over the door of what was once his shop a weather-beaten example of his skill in gold letters, the product of his own hand. Above the signature is, or was some ten years since, a small decorative panel showing a strip of yellow sand, a black dot of a boat, and a line of blue sky, so true in tone and sure in composition that when Mr. Crocker first passed that way and stood astounded before it—as did Robinson Crusoe over Friday's footprint—he was so overjoyed to find another artist besides himself in the town, that he turned into the shop, and finding only a young mechanic at work, said:

"Go to New York, young man, and study, you have a career before you."

The old landscape-painter was a sure prophet; little pen-and-ink sketches bearing the initials of this same sign-painter now sell for more than their weight in gold, while his larger canvases on the walls of our museums and galleries hold their place beside the work of the marine-painters of our own and other times and will for many a day to come.

This exile from Kennedy Square had been the first man to shake Oliver's hand the night he entered the cast-room. Social distinctions had no place in this atmosphere; it was the fellow who in his work came closest to the curve of the shoulder or to the poise of the head who proved, in the eyes of his fellow- students, his possession of an ancestry: but the ancestry was one that skipped over the Mayflower and went straight back to the great Michael and Rembrandt.

"I'm Jack Bedford, the sign-painter," he said, heartily. "You and I come from the same town," and as they grasped each other's hands a new friendship was added to Oliver's rapidly increasing list.

Oliver's seat was next to Fred, with Jack Bedford on his right. He had asked to join this group not only because he wanted to be near his two friends but because he wanted still more to be near the Milo. He had himself selected a certain angle of the head because he had worked from that same point of sight with Mr. Crocker, and it had delighted him beyond measure when the professor allowed him to place his stool so that he could almost duplicate his earlier drawing. His ambition was to get into the life-class, and the quickest road, he knew, lay through a good cast drawing. Every night for a week, therefore, he had followed the wonderful lines of the Milo's beautiful body, which seemed to grow with warmth under the flare of the overhanging gas-jets.

These favored life students occupied the room next to the casts. Mother Mulligan, in full regalia of apron and broom, often sat there as a model. Oliver had recognized her portrait at once; so can anyone else who looks over the earlier studies of half the painters of the time.

"Oh, it's you, is it—" Mrs. Mulligan herself had cried when she met Oliver in the hall, "the young gentleman that saved Miss Margaret's dog? She'll be here next week herself—she's gone home for awhile up into the mountains, where her old father and mother live. I told her many times about ye, and she'll be that pleased to meet ye, now that you're WAN of us."

It was delightful to hear her accent the "wan." Mother Mulligan always thought the institution rested on her broad shoulders, and that the students were part of her family.

The old woman could also have told Oliver of Margaret's arrival at the school, and of the impression which she, the first and only girl student, made on the night she took her place before an easel. But of the reason of her coming Mrs. Mulligan could have told nothing, nor why Margaret had been willing to exchange the comforts of a home among the New Hampshire hills for the narrow confines of a third-story back room, with Mrs. Mulligan as house- keeper and chaperon.

Fred knew all the details, of course, and how it had all come about. How a cousin of Margaret's who lived on a farm near her father's had one day, years before, left his plough standing in the furrow and apprenticed himself to a granite-cutter in the next town. How later on he had graduated in gravestones, and then in bas-reliefs, and finally had won a medal in Rome for a figure of "Hope," which was to mark the grave of a millionnaire at home. How when the statue was finished, ready to be set up, this cousin had come to Brookfield, wearing a square- cut beard, straight-out mustaches with needle-points, and funny shoes with square toes. How the girl had been disposed to laugh at him until he had told her stories of the wonderful cities beyond the sea and of his life among the painters and sculptors; then she showed him her own drawings, searching his face anxiously with her big eyes. How he had been so astounded and charmed by their delicacy and truth, that he had pleaded with her father—an obstinate old Puritan—to send her to New York to study, which the old man refused point-blank to do, only giving his consent at the last when her brother John, who had been graduated from Dartmouth and knew something of the outside world, had joined his voice to that of her mother and her own. How when she at last entered the class-room of the Academy the students had looked askance at her; the usual talk had ceased, and for a time there had been an uncomfortable restraint everywhere, until the men found her laughing quietly at their whispered jokes about her. After that the "red-headed girl in blue gingham," as she was called, had become, by virtue of that spirit of camaraderie which a common pursuit develops, "one of us" in spirit as well as in occupation.

Fred had described it all to Oliver, and every night when Oliver came in from the hall, his eyes had wandered over the group of students in the hope of seeing the strange person. A girl studying art, or anything else for that matter, seemed to him to be as incongruous as for a boy to learn dress-making or for a woman to open a barber-shop. He knew her type, he said to himself: she would be thin and awkward, with an aggressive voice that would jar on the stillness of the room. And she would believe in the doctrines of Elizabeth Cady Stanton—a name never mentioned by his mother except apologetically and in a low voice—and when she became older she would address meetings and become conspicuous in church and have her name printed in the daily papers.

Our hero's mind was intent upon these phases of character always to be found, of course, in a girl who would unsex herself to the extent that Miss Grant had done, when one night a rich, full, well-modulated voice sounding over his shoulder said:

"Excuse me, but Mother Mulligan tells me that you are Mr. Horn, Fred Stone's friend. I want to thank you for taking care of my poor Juno. It was very good of you. I am Margaret Grant."

She had approached him without his seeing her. He turned quickly to accost her and immediately lost so much of his breath that he could only stammer his thanks, and the hope that Juno still enjoyed the best of health. But the deep-brown eyes did not waver after acknowledging his reply, nor did the smile about the mouth relax.

"And I'm so glad you've come at last," she went on. "Fred has told me how you wanted to draw and couldn't. I know something myself of what it is to hunger after a thing and not get it."

He was on his feet now, the bit of charcoal still between his fingers, his shirt-cuff rolled back to give his hand more freedom. His senses were coming back, too, and there was buoyancy as well as youth in his face.

"Yes, I do love it," said Oliver, and his eyes wandered over her wonderful hair that looked like brown gold illumined by slants of sunshine, and then rested for an instant on her eyes. "I drew with old Mr. Crocker at home, but we only had one cast, just the head of the Milo, and I was the only pupil. Here everything helps me. What are you at work on, Miss Grant?"

"I'm doing the Milo, too; my seat is right in front of yours. Oh! what a good beginning," and she bent over his drawing-board. "Why, this can't be your first week," and she scanned it closely. "One minute—a little too full under the chin, isn't it?" She picked up a piece of chalk, and pointed to the shaded lines, looking first with half-closed eyes at the full-sized cast before them, and then at the drawing.

"Yes, I think you're right," said Oliver, studying the cast also with half-closed eyes. "How will that do?" and he smudged the shadow with his finger-tip.

"Just right," she answered. "How well you have the character of the face. Isn't she lovely!—I know of nothing so beautiful. There is such a queenly, womanly, self-poised simplicity about her."

Oliver thought so too, and said so with his eyes, only it was of a face framed in brown-gold that he was thinking and not of one of white plaster. He was touched too by the delicate way in which she had commended his drawings. It was the "woman" in her that pleased him, just as it had been in Sue—that subtle, dominating influence which our fine gentleman could never resist.

He shifted his stool a little to one side so that he could see her the better unobserved while she was arranging her seat and propping up her board. He noticed that, although her face was tanned by the weather, her head was set on a neck of singular whiteness. Underneath, where the back hair was tucked up, his eye caught some delicate filmy curls which softened the line between her throat and head and shone in the light like threads of gold. The shoulders sloped and the whole fulness of her figure tapered to a waist firmly held by a leather belt. A wholesome girl, he thought to himself, and good to look at, and with a certain rhythmic grace about her movements.

Her crowning glory, though, was her hair, which was parted over her forehead and caught in a simple twist behind. As the light fell upon it he observed again how full it was of varying tones like those found in the crinklings of a satin gown—yellow-gold one minute and dark brown the next. Oliver wondered how long this marvellous hair might be, and whether it would reach to the floor if it should burst its fastenings and whether Sir Peter Lely would have loved it too could he have seen this flood of gold bathing her brow and shoulders.

He found it delightful to work within a few feet of her, silent as they had to be, for much talking was discountenanced by the professor: often hours passed without any sound being heard in the room but that of the scraping of the chairs on the bare floor or the shifting of an easel.

Two or three times during the evening the old professor emerged from his room and overlooked his drawing, patiently pointing out the defects and as patiently correcting them. He was evidently impressed with Oliver's progress, for he remarked to Miss Grant, in a low voice:

"The new student draws well—he is doing first- rate," and passed on. Oliver caught the expression of satisfaction on the professor's face and interpreted it as in some way applying to his work, although he did not catch the words.

The old man rarely had to criticise Margaret's work. The suggestions made to her came oftener from the students than from the professor himself or any one of the visiting critics. In these criticisms, not only of her own work but of the others, everyone took part, each leaving his stool and helping in the discussion, when the work of the night was over. Fred's more correct eye, for instance, would be invaluable to Jack Bedford, the ex-sign-painter, who was struggling with the profile of the Gladiator; or Margaret, who could detect at a glance the faintest departure from the lines of the original, would shorten a curve on Oliver's drawing, or he in turn would advise her about the depth of a shadow or the spot for a high light.

As the nights went by and Oliver studied her the closer, the New England girl became all the more inexplicable to him. She was, he could not but admit, like no other woman he had ever met; certainly not in his present surroundings. She really seemed to belong to some fabled race—one of the Amazons, or Rhine maidens, or Norse queens for whom knights couched their lances. It was useless to compare her to any one of the girls about Kennedy Square, for she had nothing in common with any one of them. Was it because she was unhappy among her own people that she had thus exiled herself from her home, or had some love-affair blighted her life? Or could it be, as Fred had suggested, that she was willing to undergo all these discomforts and privations simply for love of her art? As this possible solution of the vexing problem became established in his mind, with the vision of Margaret herself before him, the blood mounted to his cheeks and an uncontrollable thrill of enthusiasm swept over him. He could forgive her anything if this last motive had really controlled and shaped her life.

Had he seen the more closely and with prophetic vision, he would have discerned, in this Norse queen with the golden hair, the mother of a long line of daughters, who, in the days to follow, would hang their triumphant shields beside those of their brothers, winning equal recognition in salon and gallery and conferring equal honor on their country. But Oliver's vision was no keener than that of anyone else about him. It was only the turn of Margaret's head that caught the young student's eye and the wealth of her brown-gold hair. With the future he had no concern.

What attracted him most of all in this woman who had violated all the known traditions of Kennedy Square, was a certain fearlessness of manner—an independence, a perfect ingenuousness, and a freedom from any desire to interest the students in herself. When she looked at any one of them, it was never from under drooping eyelids, as Sue would have done, nor with that coquettish, alluring glance to which he had always been accustomed. She looked straight at them with unflinching eyes that said, "I can trust you, and WILL." He had never seen exactly that look except in the portrait of his uncle's grandmother by Sir Peter Lely—the picture he had always loved. Strange to say, too, the eyes of the portrait were Margaret's eyes, and so was the color of the hair.

No vexed problems entered Margaret's head regarding the very engaging young gentleman who sat behind HER stool. He merely represented to her another student—that was all; the little band was small enough, and she was glad to see the new ones come. She noticed, it is true, certain unmistakable differences—a peculiar, soft cadence in his voice as the words slipped from his lips without their final g's; a certain deference to herself—standing until she regained her seat, an attention which she attributed at first to embarrassment over his new surroundings and to his desire to please. She noticed, too, a certain grace in his movements—a grace that attracted her, especially in the way with which he used his hands, and in the way in which he threw his head up when he laughed; but even these differences ceased to interest her after the first night of their meeting.

But it did not occur to her that he came from any different stock than the others about her, or that his blood might or might not be a shade bluer than her own. What had really impressed her more than anything else—and this only flashed into her mind while she was looking in the glass one night at her own— were his big white teeth, white as grains of corn, and the cleanliness of his hands and nails. She liked these things about him. Some of the fingers that rested on her drawing-board were often more like clothes-pins than fingers, and shocked her not a little; some, too, were stained with acids, and one or more with printer's ink that no soap could remove.

Before the evening was over Oliver became one of the class-room appointments—a young man who sat one stool behind her and was doing fairly well with his first attempt, and who would some day be able to make a creditable drawing if he had patience and application.

At the beginning of the second week a new student appeared—or rather an old one, who had been laid up at home with a cold. When Oliver arrived he found him in Margaret's seat, his easel standing where hers had been. He had a full-length drawing of the Milo—evidently the work of days—nearly finished on his board. Oliver was himself a little ahead of time—ahead of either Margaret or Fred, and had noticed the new-comer when he entered, the room being nearly empty. Jack Bedford was already at work.

"Horn," Jack cried, and beckoned to Oliver— "see the beggar in Miss Grant's seat. Won't there be a jolly row when she comes in?"

Margaret entered a moment later, her portfolio under her arm, and stood taking in the situation. Then she walked straight to her former seat, and said, in a firm but kindly tone:

"This is my place, sir. I've been at work here for a week. You see my drawing is nearly done."

The young man looked up. He toiled all day in a lithographer's shop, and these precious nights in the loft were his only glimpses of happiness. He sat without his coat, his shirt-sleeves liberally smeared with the color-stains of his trade.

"Well, it's my place, too. I sat here a week before I was taken sick," he said, in a slightly indignant tone, looking into Margaret's face in astonishment.

"But if you did," continued Margaret, "you see I am nearly through. I can't take another seat, for I'll lose the angle. I can finish in an hour if you will please give me this place to-night. You can work just as well by sitting a few feet farther along."

The lithographer, without replying, turned from her impatiently, bent over his easel, picked up a fresh bit of charcoal and corrected a line on the Milo's shoulder. So far as he was concerned the argument was closed.

Margaret stood patiently. She thought at first he was merely adding a last touch to his drawing before granting her request.

"Will you let me have the seat?" she asked.

"No," he blurted out. He was still bending over his drawing, his eyes fixed on the work. He did not even look up. "I'm going to stay here until I finish. You know the rules as well as I do. I wouldn't take your seat—what do you want to take mine for?" There was no animosity in his voice. He spoke as if announcing a fact.

The words had hardly left his lips when there came the sound of a chair being quickly pushed back, and Oliver stood beside Margaret. His eyes were flashing; his right shirt-cuff was rolled back, the bit of charcoal still between his fingers. Every muscle of his body was tense with anger. Margaret's quick instinct took in the situation at a glance. She saw Oliver's wrath and she knew its cause.

"Don't, Mr. Horn, please—please!" she cried, putting up her hand. "I'll begin another drawing. I see now that I took his seat when he was away, although I didn't know it."

Oliver stepped past her. "Get up, sir," he said, "and give Miss Grant her seat. What do you mean by speaking so to a lady?"

The apprentice—his name was Judson—raised his eyes quickly, took in Oliver's tense, muscular figure standing over him, and said, with a contemptuous wave of the hand:

"Young feller—you go and cool off somewhere, or I'll tell the professor. It's none of your business. I know the rules and—"

He never finished the sentence—not that anybody heard. He was floundering on the floor, an overturned easel and drawing-board lying across his body; Oliver standing over him with his fists tightly clenched.

"I'll teach you how to behave to a lady." The words sounded as if they came from between closed teeth. "Here's your chair, Miss Grant," and with a slight bow he placed the chair before her and resumed his seat with as much composure as if he had been in his mother's drawing-room in Kennedy Square.

Margaret was so astounded. that for a moment she could not speak. Then her voice came back to her. "I don't want it," she cried, in a half-frightened way, the tears starting in her eyes. "It was never mine—I told you so. Oh, what have you done?"

Never since the founding of the school had there been such a scene. The students jumped from their chairs and crowded about the group. The life class, which were at work in another room, startled by the uproar, swarmed out eager to know what had happened and why—and who—and what for. Old Mother Mulligan, who had been posing for the class, with a cloak about her fat shoulders and a red handkerchief binding up her head, rushed over to Margaret, thinking she had been hurt in some way, until she saw the student on the floor, still panting and half-dazed from the effect of Oliver's blow. Then she fell on her knees beside him.

At this instant Professor Cummings entered, and a sudden hush fell upon the room. Judson, with the help of Mother Mulligan's arm, had picked himself up, and. would have made a rush at Oliver had not big sack Bedford stopped him.

"Who's to blame for this?" asked the professor, looking from one to the other.

Oliver rose from his seat.

"This man insulted Miss Grant and I threw him out of her chair," he answered quietly.

"Insulted you!" cried the professor, in surprise, and he turned to Margaret. "What did he say?"

"I never said a word to her," whined Judson, straightening his collar. "I told her the seat was mine, and so it is. That wasn't insulting her."

"It's all a mistake, professor—Mr. Horn did not understand," protested Margaret. "It was his seat, not mine. He began his drawing first. I didn't know it when I commenced mine. I told Mr. Horn so."

"Why did you strike him?" asked the professor, and he turned and faced Oliver.

"Because he had no business to speak to her as he did. She is the only lady we have among us and every man in the class ought to remember it, and every man has since I've been here except this one."

There was a slight murmur of applause. Judson's early training had been neglected as far as his manners went, and he was not popular.

The professor looked searchingly into Oliver's eyes and a flush of pride in the boy's pluck tinged his pale cheeks. He had once thrown a fellow-student out of a window in Munich himself for a similar offence, and old as he was he had never forgotten it.

"You come from the South, Mr. Horn, I hear," he said in a gentler voice, "and you are all a hot- tempered race, and often do foolish things. Judson meant no harm—he says so, and Miss Grant says so. Now you two shake hands and make up. We are trying to learn to draw here, not to batter each other's heads."

Oliver's eyes roved from one to the other; he was too astonished to make further reply. He had only done what he knew every other man around Kennedy Square would have done under similar circumstances, and what any other woman would have thanked him for. Why was everybody here against him—even the girl herself! What sort of people were these who would stand by and see a woman insulted and make no defence or outcry? He could not have looked his father in the face again, nor Sue, nor anyone else in Kennedy Square, if he had failed to protect her.

For a moment he hesitated, his eyes searching each face. He had hoped that someone who had witnessed the outrage would come forward and uphold his act. When no voice broke the stillness he crossed the room and taking the lithographer's hand, extended rather sullenly, answered, quietly: "If Miss Grant is satisfied, I am," and peace was once more restored.

Margaret sharpened her charcoals and bent over her drawing. She was so agitated she could not trust herself to touch its surface. "If I am SATISFIED," she kept repeating to herself. The words, somehow, seemed to carry a reproach with them. "Why shouldn't I be satisfied.? I have no more rights in the room than the other students about me; that is, I thought I hadn't until I heard what he said. How foolish for him to cause all this fuss about nothing, and make me so conspicuous."

But even as she said the words to herself she remembered Oliver's tense figure and the look of indignation on his face. She had never been accustomed to seeing men take up the cudgels for women. There had been no opportunity, perhaps, nor cause, but even if there had been, she could think of no one whom she had ever met who would have done as much for her just because she was a woman.

A little sob, which she could not have explained to herself, welled up to her throat. Much as she gloried in her own self-reliance, she suddenly and unexpectedly found herself exulting in a quality heretofore unknown to her—that quality which had compelled an almost total stranger to take her part. Then the man himself! How straight and strong and handsome he was as he stood looking at Judson, and then the uplifted arm, the quick spring, and, best of all, the calm, graceful way in which he had handed her the chair! She could not get the picture out of her mind. Last, she remembered with a keen sense of pleasure the chivalrous look in his face when he held out his hand to the man who a moment before had received its full weight about his throat.

She had not regained mastery of herself even when she leaned across her drawing-board, pretending to be absorbed in her work. The curves of the Milo seemed in some strange way to have melted into the semblance of the outlines of other visions sunk deep in her soul since the days of her childhood—visions which for years past had been covered over by the ice of a cold, hard puritanical training, that had prevented any bubbles of sentiment from ever rising to the surface of her heart. As remembrances of these visions rushed through her mind the half-draped woman, with the face of the Madonna and the soul of the Universal Mother shining through every line of her beautiful body, no longer stood before her. It was a knight in glittering armor now, with drawn sword and visor up, beneath which looked out the face of a beautiful youth aflame with the fire of a holy zeal. She caught the flash of the sun on his breastplate of silver, and the sweep of his blade, and heard his clarion voice sing out. And then again, as she closed her eyes, this calm, lifeless cast became a gallant, blue-eyed prince, who knelt beside her and kissed her finger-tips, his doffed plumes trailing at her feet.

When the band of students were leaving the rooms that night, Margaret called Oliver to her side, and extending her hand, said, with a direct simplicity that carried conviction in every tone of her voice and in which no trace of her former emotions were visible:

"I hope you'll forgive me, Mr. Horn. I'm all alone here in this city and I have grown so accustomed to depending on myself that, perhaps, I failed to understand how you felt about it. I am very grateful to you. Good-night."

She had turned away before he could do more than express his regret over the occurrence. He wanted to follow her; to render her some assistance; to comfort her in some way. It hurt him to see her go out alone into the night. He wished he might offer his arm, escort her home, make some atonement for the pain he had caused her. But there was a certain proud poise of the head and swift glance of the eye which held him back.

While he stood undecided whether to break through her reserve and join her, he saw Mrs. Mulligan come out of the basement, stop a passing stage, and, helping Margaret in, take the seat beside her.

"I am glad she does not go out alone," he said to himself and turned away.



CHAPTER XIII

BELOW MOOSE HILLOCK



It was not long before the bare rooms of the Academy School—owing to the political situation, which necessitated the exercise of economies in every direction—began to suffer.

One night the students found the gas turned out and a small card tacked on the door of the outer hall. It read—

SCHOOL CLOSED FOR WANT OF

FUNDS. WILL PERHAPS BE

OPENED IN THE AUTUMN.

Signs of like character were not unusual in the history of the school. The wonder was, considering the vicissitudes through which the Academy had passed, that it was opened at all. From the institution's earlier beginnings in the old house on Bond Street, to its flight from the loft close to Grace Church and then to the abandoned building opposite the old hotel near Washington Square, where Amos Cobb always stayed when he came to New York, and so on down to its own home on Broadway, its history had been one long struggle for recognition and support.

This announcement, bitter enough as it was to Oliver, was followed by another even more startling, when he reached the office next day, and Mr. Slade called him into his private room.

"Mr. Horn," said his employer, motioning Oliver to a seat and drawing his chair close beside him so that he could lay his hand upon the young man's knee, "I am very sorry to tell you that after the first of June we shall be obliged to lay you off. It is not because we are dissatisfied with your services, for you have been a faithful clerk, and we all like you and wish you could stay, but the fact is if this repudiation goes on we will all be ruined. I am not going to discharge you; I'm only going to give you a holiday for a few months. Then, if the war-scare blows over we want you back again. I appreciate that this has come as suddenly upon you as it has upon us, and I hope you will not feel offended when, in addition to your salary, I hand you the firm's check for an extra amount. You must not look upon it as a gift, for you have earned every cent of it."

These two calamities were duly reported in a ten- page letter to his mother by our young hero, sitting alone, as he wrote, up in his sky-parlor, crooning over his dismal coke fire. "Was he, then, to begin over again the weary tramping of the streets?" he said to himself. "And the future! What did that hold in store for him? Would the time ever come when he could follow the bent of his tastes? He was getting on so well—even Miss Grant had said so—and it had not interfered with his work at the store, either. The check in his pocket proved that."

His mother's answer made his heart bound with joy.

"Take Mr. Slade at his word. He is your friend and means what he says. Find a place for the summer where you can live cheaply and where the little money which you now have will pay your way. In the fall you can return to your work. Don't think of coming home, much as I should like to put my arms around you. I cannot spare the money to bring you here now, as I have just paid the interest on the mortgage. Moreover, the whole of Kennedy Square is upset and our house seems to be the centre of disturbance. Your father's views on slavery are well known, and he is already being looked upon with disfavor by some of our neighbors. At the club the other night he and Judge Bowman had some words which were very distressing to me. Mr. Cobb was present, and was the only one who took your father's part. Your father, as you may imagine, is very anxious over the political situation, but I cannot think our people are going to fight and kill each other, as Colonel Clayton predicts they will before another year has passed."

Oliver's heart bounded like a loosened balloon as he laid down his mother's letter and began pacing the room. Neither the political outlook, nor club discussions, nor even his mother's hopes and fears, concerned him. It was the sudden loosening of all his bonds that thrilled him. Four months to do as he pleased in; the dreadful mortgage out of the way for six months; his mother willing, and he with money enough in his pocket to pay his way without calling upon her for a penny! Was there ever such luck! All care rolled from his shoulders—even the desire to see his mother and Sue and those whom he loved at home was forgotten in the rosy prospect before him.

The next day he told Mr. Slade of his plans, and read him part of his mother's letter.

"Very sensible woman, your mother," his employer answered, with his bluff heartiness. "Just the thing for you to do; and I've got the very spot. Go to Ezra Pollard's. He lives up in the mountains at a little place called East Branch, on the edge of a wilderness. I fish there every spring, and I'll give you a letter to him."

Long before his day of departure came he had dusted out his old hair trunk—there were other and more modern trunks to be had, but Oliver loved this one because it had been his father's—gathered his painting materials together — his easel, brushes, leather case, and old slouch hat that he wore to fish in at home—and spent his time counting the days and hours when he could leave the world behind him and, as he wrote Fred, "begin to live."

He was not alone in this planning for a summer exodus. The other students had indeed all cut their tether-strings and disappeared long before his own freedom came. Jack Bedford had gone to the coast to live with a fisherman and paint the surf, and Fred was with his people away up near the lakes. As for the lithographers, sign-painters, and beginners, they were spending their evenings somewhere else than in the old room under the shaded gas-jets. Even Margaret, so Mother Mulligan told him, was up "wid her folks, somewheres."

"And she was that broken-hearted," she added, "whin they shut up the school—bad cess to 'em! Oh, ye would a-nigh kilt yerself wid grief to a-seen her, poor darlint."

"Where is her home?" asked Oliver, ignoring the tribute to his sympathetic tendencies. He had no reason for asking, except that she had been the only woman among them, and he accordingly felt that a certain courtesy was due her even in her absence.

"I've bothered me head loose tryin' to remimber, but for the soul o' me, I can't. It's cold enough up there, I know, to freeze ye solid, for Miss Margaret had wan o' her ears nipped last time she was home."

And so one fine morning in June, with Oliver bursting with happiness, the hair trunk and the leather case and sketching umbrella were thrown out at a New England way-station in the gray dawn from a train in which Oliver had spent the night curled up on one of the seats.

Just as he had expected, the old coach that was to carry him was waiting beside the platform. There was a rush for top seats, and Oliver got the one beside the driver, and the trunk and traps were stored in the boot under the driver's seat—it was a very small trunk and took up but little room—and Marvin cracked his whip and away everybody went, the dogs barking behind and the women waving their aprons from the porches of the low houses facing the road.

And it was a happy young fellow who filled his lungs with the fresh air of the morning and held on to the iron rail of the top seat as they bumped over the "Thank ye marms," and who asked the driver innumerable questions which it was part of the noted whip's duty and always his pleasure to answer. The squirrels darted across the road as if to get a look at the enthusiast and then ran for their lives to escape the wheels; and the crows heard the rumble and rose in a body from the sparse cornfields for a closer view; and the big trees arched over his head, cooling the air and casting big shadows, and even the sun kept peeping over the edge of the hills from behind some jutting rock or clump of pines or hemlock as if bent on lighting up his face so that everybody could see how happy he was.

As the day wore on and the coach rattled over the big open bridge that spanned the rushing mountain- stream, Oliver's eye caught, far up the vista, the little dent in the line of blue that stood low against the sky. The driver said this was the Notch and that the big hump to the right was Moose Hillock, and that Ezra's cabin nestled at its feet and was watered by the rushing stream, only it was a tiny little brook away up there that anybody could step over.

"'Tain't bigger'n yer body where it starts out fresh up in them mountings," the driver said, touching his leaders behind their ears with the lash of his whip. "Runs clean round Ezra's, and's jest as chuckfull o' trout, be gosh, as a hive is o' bees."

And the swing and the freedom of it all! No office- hours to keep; no boxes to nail up and roll out—nothing but sweetness and cool draughts of fresh mountain-air, and big trees that he wanted to get down and hug; and jolly laughing brooks that ran out to meet him and called to him as he trotted along, or as the horses did, which was the same thing, he being part of the team.

And the day! Had there ever been such another? And the sky, too, filled with soft white clouds that sailed away over his head—the little ones far in advance and already crowding up the Notch, which was getting nearer every hour.

And Marvin the driver—what a character he was and how quaint his speech. And the cabins by the road, with their trim fences and winter's wood piled up so neatly under the sheds—all so different from any which he had seen at the South and all so charming and exhilarating.

Never had he been so happy!

And why not? Twenty-three and in perfect health, without a care, and for the first time in all his life doing what he wanted most to do, with opportunities opening every hour for doing what he believed he could do best.

Oh, for some planet where such young saplings can grow without hinderance from the ignorant and the unsympathetic; where they can reach out for the sun on all sides and stretch their long arms skyward; where each vine can grow as it would in all the luxuriance of its nature, free from the pruning-knife of criticism and the straitlaced trellis of conventionality—a planet on which the Puritan with his creeds, customs, fads, issues, and dogmas, and the Cavalier with his traditions and time-honored notions never sat foot. Where every round peg fits a round hole, and men toil with a will and with unclouded brows because their hearts find work for their hands and each day's task is a joy.

If the road and the country on each side of it, and the giant trees, now that they neared the mountains, and the deep ravines and busy, hurrying brooks had each inspired some exclamation of joy from Oliver, the first view of Ezra's cabin filled him so full of uncontrollable delight that he could hardly keep his seat long enough for Marvin to rein in his horses and get down and swing back the gate that opened into the pasture surrounding the house.

"Got a boarder for ye, Ezra," Marvin called to Oliver's prospective host, who had come down to meet the stage and get his empty butter-pails. Then, in a lower tone: "Sezs he's a painter chap, and that Mr. Slade sent him up. He's goin' to bunk in with ye all summer, he sezs. Seems like a knowin', happy kind er young feller."

They were pulling the pails from the rear boot, each one tied up in a wheat-sack, with a card marked "Ezra Pollard" sewed on the outside to distinguish it from the property of other East Branch settlers up and down the road.

Oliver had slipped from his seat and was tugging at his hair trunk. He did not know that the long, thin, slab-sided old fellow in a slouch hat, hickory shirt crossed by one suspender, and heavy cowhide boots was his prospective landlord. He supposed him to be the hired man, and that he would find Mr. Pollard waiting for him in the little sitting-room with the windows full of geraniums that looked so inviting and picturesque.

"Marve sez you're lookin' fur me. Come along. Glad ter see ye."

"Are you Mr. Pollard?" His surprise not only marked the tones of his voice but the expression of his face.

"No, jes' Ezry Pollard, that's all. Hope Mr. Slade's up and hearty?"

Mr. Slade was never so "up and hearty" as was Oliver that next morning.

Up with the sun he was, and hearty as a young buck out of a bed of mountain-moss.

"Time to be movin', ain't it?" came Ezra Pollard's voice, shouting up the unpainted staircase, "Hank's drawed a bucket out here at the well for ye to wash in. Needn't worry about no towel. Samanthy's got one fur ye, but ye kin bring yer comb."

At the sound of Ezra's voice Oliver sprang from the coarse straw mattress—it had been as eider-down to his stage-jolted body—pushed open the wooden blind and peered out. The sun was peeping over the edge of the Notch and looking with wide eyes into the saucer-shaped valley in which the cabin stood. The fogs which at twilight had stolen down to the meadows and had made a night of it, now startled into life by the warm rays of the sun, were gathering up their skirts of shredded mist and tiptoeing back up the hill-side, looking over their shoulders as they fled. The fresh smell of the new corn watered by the night dew and the scent of pine and balsam from the woods about him, filled the morning air. Songs of birds were all about, a robin on a fence-post and two larks high in air, singing as they flew.

Below him, bounding from rock to rock, ran the brook, laughing in the sunlight and tossing the spray high in the air in a mad frolic. Across this swirling line of silver lay a sparse meadow strewn with rock, plotted with squares of last year's crops—potatoes, string-beans, and cabbages, and now combed into straight green lines of early buckwheat and turnips. Beyond this a ragged pasture, fenced with blackened stumps, from which came the tinkle of cow-bells, and farther on the grim, silent forest—miles and miles of forest seamed by a single road leading to Moose Hillock and the great Stone Face.

Oliver slipped into his clothes; ran down the stairs and out into the fresh morning air. As he walked toward the well his eyes caught sight of Hank's bucket tilted on one edge of the well-curb, over which hung the big sweep, its lower end loaded with stone. On the platform stood a wooden bench sloppy with the drippings of the water-soaked pail. This bench held a tin basin and half a bar of rosin soap. Beside it was a single post sprouting hickory prongs, on which were hung as many cleanly scoured milk- pails glittering in the sun. On this post Hank had nailed a three-cornered piece of looking-glass—Hank had a sweetheart in the village below—a necessity and useful luxury, he told Oliver afterward, "in slickin' yerself up fer meals."

Once out in the sunshine Oliver, with the instinct of the painter suddenly roused, looked about him. He found that the cabin which had delighted him so in the glow of the afternoon, was even more enchanting in the light of the morning. To the plain, every-day, practical man it was but a long box with a door in the middle of each side, front and back—one opening into a sitting-room, which again opened into a bedroom in which Ezra and his wife slept, with the windows choked with geraniums, their red cheeks pressed against the small panes, and the other opening into a kitchen, connecting with a pantry and a long, rambling woodshed. To our young Raphael the simple cabin, from its homely sagging door to its broken-backed roof, covered with rotting shingles, was nothing less than an enchanted palace.

He remembered the shingles. He had reached up in the night and touched them with his hands. He remembered, too, the fragrance they gave out—a hot, dry, spicy smell. He remembered also the dried apples spread out on a board beside his bed, and the broken spinning-wheel, and the wasp's nest. He was sure, too, there were many other fascinating relics stored away in this old attic. But for the sputtering tallow-candle, which the night before was nearly burnt out, he would have examined everything else about him before he went to sleep.

Then his eye fell on the woodshed and the huge pile of chips that Hank's axe had made in supplying Samanthy's stove, and the rickety, clay-plastered buggy and buckboard that had never known water since the day of their birth. And the two muskrat skins nailed to the outside planking—spoils of the mill-dam, a mile below.

Yes; he could paint here!

With a thrill of delight surging through him he rolled up his sleeves, tilted the bucket, filled the basin with ice-cold water which Hank had drawn for him, a courtesy only shown a stranger guest, and plunging in his hands and face, dashed the water over his head. Samanthy, meanwhile, in sunbonnet and straight-up-and-down calico dress, had come out with the towel—half a salt-sack, washed and rewashed to phenomenal softness (an ideal towel is a salt-sack to those who know). Then came the rubbing until his flesh was aglow, and the parting of the wet hair with the help of Hank's glass, and with a toss of a stray lock back from his forehead Oliver went in to breakfast.

It fills me with envy when I think of that first toilet of Oliver's! I too have had just such morning dips —one in Como, with the great cypresses standing black against the glow of an Italian dawn; another in the Lido at sunrise, my gondolier circling about me as I swam; still a third in Stamboul, with the long slants of light piercing the gloom of the stone dome above me—but oh, the smell of the pines and the great sweep of openness, with the mountains looking down and the sun laughing, and the sparkle and joyousness of it all! Ah, what a lucky dog was this Oliver!

And the days that followed! Each one a delight— each one happier than the one before. The sun seemed to soak into his blood; the strength of the great hemlocks with their giant uplifted arms seemed to have found its way to his muscles. He grew stronger, more supple. He could follow Hank all day now, tramping the brook or scaling the sides of Bald Face, its cheeks scarred with thunderbolts. And with this joyous life there came a light into his eyes, a tone in his voice, a spring and buoyancy in his step that brought him back to the days when he ran across Kennedy Square and had no care for the day nor thought for the morrow. Before the week was out he had covered half a dozen canvases with pictures of the house as he saw it that first morning, bathed in the sunshine; of the brook; the sweep of the Notch, and two or three individual trees that he had fallen in love with—a ragged birch in particular —a tramp of a birch with its toes out of its shoes and its bark coat in tatters.

Before the second week had arrived he had sought the main stage-road and had begun work on a big hemlock that stood sentinel over a turn in the highway. There was a school-house in the distance and a log-bridge under which the brook plunged. Here he settled himself for serious work.

He was so engrossed that he had not noticed the school-children who had come up noiselessly from behind and were looking in wonder at his drawings. Presently a child, who in her eagerness had touched his shoulder, broke the stillness in apology.

"Say, Mister, there's a lady comes to school every day. She's a painter too, and drawed Sissy Mathers."

Oliver glanced at the speaker and the group about her; wished them all good-morning and squeezed a fresh tube on his palette. He was too much absorbed in his work for prolonged talk. The child, emboldened by his cheery greeting, began again, the others crowding closer. "She drawed the bridge too, and me and Jennie Waters was sitting on the rail—she's awful nice."

Oliver looked up, smiling.

"What's her name?"

"I don't know. Teacher calls her Miss Margaret, but there's more to it. She comes every year."

Oliver bent over his easel, drew out a line brush from the sheaf in his hand, caught up a bit of yellow ochre from his palette and touched up the shadow of the birch. "All the women painters must be Margarets," he said to himself. Then he fell to wondering what had become of her since the school closed. He had always felt uncomfortable over the night when he had defended "the red-headed girl in blue gingham," as she was called by the students. She had placed him in the wrong by misunderstanding his reasons for serving her. The students had always looked upon him after that as a quarrelsome person, when he was only trying to protect a woman from insult. He could not find it in his heart to blame her, but he wished that it had not happened. As these thoughts filled his mind he became so absorbed that the children's good-by failed to reach his ear.

That day Hank had brought him his luncheon— two ears of hot corn in a tin bucket, four doughnuts and an apple—the corn in the bottom of the bucket and the doughnuts and apple on top. He could have walked home for his midday meal, for he was within sound of Samanthy's dinner-horn, but he liked it better this way.

Leaving his easel standing in the road, he had waved his hand in good-by to Hank, picked up the bucket and had crept under the shadow of the bridge to eat his luncheon. He had finished the corn, thrown the cobs to the fish, and was beginning on the doughnuts, when a step on the planking above him caused him to look up. A girl in a tam-o'-shanter cap was leaning over the rail. The sun was behind her, throwing her face into shadow—so blinding a light that Oliver only caught the nimbus of fluffy hair that framed the dark spot of her head. Then came a voice that sent a thrill of surprise through him.

"Why, Mr. Horn! Who would have thought of meeting you here?"

Oliver was on his feet in an instant—a half-eaten doughnut in one hand, his slouch hat in the other. With this he was shading his eyes against the glare of the sun. He was still ignorant of who had spoken to him.

"I beg your pardon, I—WHY, Miss Grant!" The words burst from his lips as if they had been fired from a gun. "You here!"

"Yes, I live only twenty miles away, and I come here every year. Where are you staying?"

"At Pollard's."

"Why, that's the next clearing from mine. I'm at old Mrs. Taft's. Oh, please don't leave your luncheon."

Oliver had bounded up the bank to a place beside her.

"How good it is to find you here. I am so glad." He WAS glad; he meant every word of it. "Mrs. Mulligan said you lived up in the woods, but I had no idea it was in these mountains. Have you had your luncheon?"

"No, not yet," and Margaret held up a basket. "Look!" and she raised the lid. "Elderberry pie, two pieces of cake—"

"Good! and I have three doughnuts and an apple. I swallowed every grain of my hot corn like a greedy Jack Horner, or you should have half of it. Come down under the bridge, it's so cool there," and he caught her hand to help her down the bank.

She followed him willingly. She had seen him greet Fred, and Jack Bedford, and even the gentle Professor with just such outbursts of affection, and she knew there was nothing especially personal to her in it all. It was only his way of saying he was glad to see her.

Oliver laid the basket and tin can on a flat stone that the spring freshets had scoured clean; spread his brown corduroy jacket on the pebbly beach beside it, and with a laugh and the mock gesture of a courtier, conducted her to the head of his improvised table. Margaret laughed and returned the bow, stepping backward with the sweep of a great lady, and settled herself beside him. In a moment she was on her knees bending over the brook, her hands in the water, the tam-o'-shanter beside her. She must wash her hands, she said—"there was a whole lot of chrome yellow on her fingers"—and she held them up with a laugh for Oliver's inspection. Oliver watched her while she dried and bathed her shapely hands, smoothed the hair from her temples and tightened the coil at the back of her head which held all this flood of gold in check, then he threw himself down beside her, waiting until she should serve the feast.

As he told her of his trip up the valley and the effect it made upon him, and how he had never dreamed of anything so beautiful, and how good the Pollards were; and what he had painted and what he expected to paint; talking all the time with his thumb circling about as if it was a bit of charcoal and the air it swept through but a sheet of Whatman's best, her critical eye roamed over his figure and costume. She had caught in her first swift, comprehensive glance from over the bridge-rail, the loose jacket and broad-brimmed planter's hat, around which, with his love of color, Oliver had twisted a spray of nasturtium blossoms and leaves culled from the garden- patch that morning; but now that he was closer, she saw the color in his cheeks and noticed, with a suppressed smile, the slight mustache curling at the ends, a new feature since the school had closed. She followed too the curves of the broad chest and the muscles outlined through his shirt. She had never thought him so strong and graceful, nor so handsome. (The smile came to the surface now—an approving, admiring smile.) It was the mountain-climbing, no doubt, she said to herself, and the open-air life that had wrought the change.

With a laugh and toss of her head she unpacked her own basket and laid her contribution to the feast on the flat rock—the pie on a green dock-leaf, which she reached over and pulled from the water's edge, and the cake on the pink napkin—the only sign of city luxury in her outlay. Oliver's eye meanwhile wandered over her figure and costume—a costume he had never seen before on any living woman, certainly not any woman around Kennedy Square. The cloth skirt came to her ankles, which were covered with yarn stockings, and her feet were encased in shoes that gave him the shivers, the soles being as thick as his own and the leather as tough. (Sue Clayton would have died with laughter had she seen those shoes.) Her blouse was of gray flannel, belted to the waist by a cotton saddle-girth—white and red —and as broad as her hand. The tam-o'-shanter was coarse and rough, evidently home-made, and not at all like McFudd's, which was as soft as the back of a kitten and without a seam.

Then his eyes sought her face. He noticed how brown she was—and how ruddy and healthy. How red the lips—red as mountain-berries, and back of them big white teeth—white as peeled almonds. He caught the line of the shoulders and the round of the full arm and tapering wrist, and the small, well- shaped hand. "Queer clothes," he said to himself —"but the girl inside is all right."

Sitting under the shadow of the old bridge on the main highway, each weighed and balanced the other, even as they talked aloud of the Academy School, and the pupils, and the dear old Professor whom they both loved. They discussed the prospect of its doors being opened the next winter. They talked of Mrs. Mulligan, and the old Italian who sold peanuts, and whose head Margaret had painted; and of Jack Bedford and Fred Stone—the dearest fellow in the world—and last year's pictures—especially Church's "Niagara," the sensation of the year, and Whittredge's "Mountain Brook," and every other subject their two busy brains could rake and scrape up except —and this subject, strange to say, was the only one really engrossing their two minds—the overturning of Mr. Judson's body on the art-school floor, and the upsetting of Miss Grant's mind for days thereafter. Once Oliver had unintentionally neared the danger- line by mentioning the lithographer's name, but Margaret had suddenly become interested in the movements of a chipmunk that had crept down for the crumbs of their luncheon, and with a woman's wit had raised her finger to her lips to command silence lest he should be frightened off.

They painted no more that afternoon. When the shadows began to fall in the valley they started up the road, picking up Oliver's easel and trap—both had stood unmolested and would have done so all summer with perfect safety—and Oliver walked with Margaret as far as the bars that led into Taft's pasture. There they bade each other good-night, Margaret promising to be ready in the morning with her big easel and a fresh canvas, which Oliver was to carry, when they would both go sketching together and make a long blessed summer day of it.

That night Oliver's upraised, restless hands felt the shingles over his head more than once before he could get to sleep. He had not thought he could be any happier—but he was. Margaret's unexpected appearance had restored to him that something which the old life at home had always yielded. He was never really happy without the companionship of a woman, and this he had not had since leaving Kennedy Square. Those he had met on rare occasions in New York were either too conventional or selfconscious, or they seemed to be offended at his familiar Southern ways. This one was so sensible and companionable, and so appreciative and sympathetic. He felt he could say anything to her and she would know what he meant. Perhaps, too, by and by she would understand just why he had upset a man who had been rude to her.

Margaret lay awake, too—not long—not more than five minutes, perhaps. Long enough, however, to wish she was not so sunburnt, and that she had brought her other dress and a pair of gloves and a hat instead of this rough mountain-suit. Long enough, too, to recall Oliver's standing beside her on the bridge with his big hat sweeping the ground, the color mounting to his cheeks, and that joyous look in his eyes.

"Was he really glad to see me," she said to herself, as she dropped off into dreamland, "or is it his way with all the women he meets? I wonder, too, if he protects them all?"

And so ended a day that always rang out in Oliver's memory with a note of its own.

These dreams under the shingles! What would life be without them?



CHAPTER XIV

UNDER A BARK SLANT



The weeks that followed were rare ones for Margaret and Oliver.

They painted all day and every day.

The little school-children posed for them, and so did the prim school-mistress, a girl of eighteen in spectacles with hair cut short in the neck. And old Jonathan Gordon, the fisherman, posed, too, with a string of trout in one hand and a long pole cut from a sapling in the other. And once our two young comrades painted the mill-dam and the mill— Oliver doing the first and Margaret the last; and Baker, the miller, caught them at it, and insisted in all sincerity that some of the money which the pictures brought must come to him, if the report were true that painters did get money for pictures. "It's my mill, ain't it?—and I ain't give no permission to take no part of it away. Hev I?"

They climbed the ravines, Margaret carrying the luncheon and Oliver the sketch-traps; they built fires of birch-bark and roasted potatoes, or made tea in the little earthen pot that Mrs. Taft loaned her. Or they waited for the stage in the early morning, and went half a dozen miles down the valley to paint some waterfall Oliver had seen the day he drove up with Marvin, or a particular glimpse of Moose Hillock from the covered bridge, or various shady nooks and sunlit vistas that remained fastened in Oliver's mind, and the memory of which made him unhappy until Margaret could enjoy them, too.

The fact that he and a woman whom he had known but a little while were roaming the woods together, quite as a brother and sister might have done, never occurred to him. If it had it would have made no difference, nor could he have understood why any barrier should have been put up between them. He had been taking care of girls in that same way all his life. Every woman was a sister to him so far as his reverent protection over her went. The traditions of Kennedy Square had taught him this.