reature which science had not yet classified or named.
Before this phenomenon stood--or rather fidgeted--a beautiful Arabian
horse with flashing eyes, and limbs clean cut as if by Doric chisel in
marble of Pentelicus. This superb animal was held by two grooms, one at
his head, the other holding first one foot, then another, as the order
to pose the unwilling model fractionally in the attitude of a prancing,
curveting Bucephalus came from the square, five-legged, unnamed creature
in the corner.

"Ah!" thought Paletta as she followed her shadow over the sunny
pavement, "the famous animal-painter Jacques is behind that great square
canvas, I know, for I saw him there yesterday painting a struggling
sheep."

The large room was closely packed with easels--so closely, indeed, that
an inadvertent motion of hand or foot often sent a wave of excitement
through the whole atelier. Heads of every color, from youthful flaxen to
venerable gray, were bent over their labors. Hecubas and Helens worked
side by side; maulsticks everywhere gave the scene the appearance of a
winter-denuded thicket; plaster hands, feet and torsos hung upon the
walls; bull-headed Nero swelled upon a shelf beside the mutilated Venus
which is a revelation of the glory that merely human beauty can attain
without a gleam borrowed from the divine; fat Vitellius seemed to snore
open-eyed beside lean and wakeful Julius Caesar; a mask of Medusa leaned
lovingly upon the shoulder of Dante; Apollo Belvedere smiled upon an
_ecorche_--in atelier parlance "skun man;" finished and unfinished
studies of heads, bodies and detached sections of bodies hung from nails
in every possible and impossible place. Upon a slightly elevated
platform sat the model in his usual street-costume, with oily hair,
parted in the middle, falling in long waves upon his shoulders. A spiky
circle rested upon his brow, and upon his face was such a stupendous yet
futile effort after an expression of divine sweetness and resignation as
caused maulsticks to separate themselves every now and then from the
denuded thicket and to wabble vaguely about his mouth or play wildly in
his hair, accompanied by the commands, "Posez la bouche!" "Posez les
yeux!" or, in good American accents, accompanied with a sniff of wrath,
"Call _him_ a good Christ? Umph! He'd pose better as a first-class
Cheshire cat."

[Illustration: "THE BEST CHRIST IN PARIS."]

The model's divine smile broadened suddenly into a very human