nted at the canvas with his stick,
"_Combien?_" When Ludlow looked round up at him and answered with a
pleasant light in his eye, "Well, I don't know exactly. What'll you
give?" Burton spared his life, and became his friend. He called his
wife to him, and they bought the picture, and afterwards they went to
Ludlow's lodging, for he had no studio, and conscientiously painted in
the open air, and bought others. They got the pictures dog cheap, as
Burton said, for Ludlow was just beginning then, and his reputation
which has never since become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant.
They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him
with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came
home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the
West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up,
and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range.
Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for
impressionism; and then he changed his mind all at once, and under an
impulse of sudden patriotism, declared for the American sky, and the
thin, crystalline, American air. His faith included American subjects,
and when, after his arrival in New York, Burton wrote to claim a visit
from him and ironically proposed the trotting-match at the County Fair
as an attraction for his pencil, Ludlow remembered the trotting-matches
he had seen in his boyhood, and came out to Pymantoning with a
seriousness of expectation that alarmed and then amused his friends.

He was very glad that he had come, and that night, after the supper
which lasted well into the early autumn lamp-light, he went out and
walked the village streets under the September moon, seeing his picture
everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The
maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a
high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the
bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard
trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them.
Within their shadowy porches, or beside their gates, was

"The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies,"

hushing itself at his approach, and breaking out again at his retreat.
The air seemed full of love, and in the midst of his proud, gay hopes,
he felt smitten with sudden isolation, such as youth knows in the
presen