tline. It is that you resemble so many
relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness
in your countenance.

He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:

There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never
thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye,
those I knew I had. But there is a something which recalls a smile that
faded away from my sister's lips--how many years ago! I thought it so
pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.

Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The
artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging
outwards from the eye over the temple. Five years.--The artist draws one
tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the
eyebrows. Ten years.--The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth,
so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and
recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the
same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.--Hold on! Stop
that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of
that interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc.,
etc., etc.?

There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the wrongs
of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye and the
reflection of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET that painted
us?

"Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
COWPER.

--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with
any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation,
and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole
individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As soon as we
are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in
hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual
in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with
fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face
into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the
very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it
brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space
wh