young artist long to execute them in
hard stone, and to see them placed in the honored, though indeed pagan,
spot, which was intended for them. And now the bishop forbade him the
work, and the poor fellow might well be feeling just as he himself
had felt thirty years ago, when he had been commanded to abandon the
immature first-fruits of his labor.

Was the bishop indeed right? This and many other questions agitated the
sleepless father, and as soon as he heard that his wife had risen from
her bed to go to her son, whose footsteps he too could hear overhead, he
got up and followed her.

He found the door of the work-room open, and, himself unseen and
unheard, he was witness to his wife's vehement speech, and to the lad's
justification, while Polykarp's work stood in the full light of the
lamps, exactly in front of him.

His gaze was spell-bound to the mass of clay; he looked and looked, and
was not weary of looking, and his soul swelled with the same awe-struck
sense of devout admiration that it had experienced, when for the first
time, in his early youth, he saw with his own eyes the works of the
great old Athenian masters in the Caesareum.

And this head was his son's work!

He stood there greatly overcome, his hands clasped together, holding
his breath till his mouth was dry, and swallowing his tears to keep them
from falling. At the same time he listened with anxious attention, so as
not to lose one word of Polykarp's.

"Aye, thus and thus only are great works of art begotten," said he to
himself, "and if the Lord had bestowed on me such gifts as on this lad,
no father, nay, no god, should have compelled me to leave my Ariadne
unfinished. The attitude of the body was not bad I should say--but the
head, the face--Aye, the man who can mould such a likeness as that has
his hand and eye guided by the holy spirits of art. He who has done that
head will be praised in the latter days together with the great Athenian
masters--and he-yes, he, merciful Heaven! he is my own beloved son!"

A blessed sense of rejoicing, such as he had not felt since his early
youth, filled his heart, and Dorothea's ardor seemed to him half pitiful
and half amusing.

It was not till his duteous son took the hammer in his hand, that he
stepped between his wife and the bust, saying kindly:

"There will be time enough to-morrow to destroy the work. Forget the
model, my son, now that you have taken advantage of it so successfully.
I know o