cupation admits of
no impressionism, and requires uniform scrupulosity. With regard
to the tournament, I accept your challenge, provided, of course,
there is a competent umpire.

"What do you think of that?" questioned my sister with concern.

"I think, my good Sarah, it is the oddest piece of work you ever set
your hand to, and that you have let us both in for substantial damages
in the form of wedding presents."

"The Soul of Me."

"'The wrong was mine!' he cried. 'I left my dove'
(He flung him down upon the clay),
'And now I find her flown--ah, well away!'"

After long sauntering in the Antipodes, I was naturally anxious to hear
of him--of his inner life particularly--for his fame as a worldling had
skirted the globe. The north wind had trumpeted of it; the south had
whispered poetically, if insidiously; the east had contradicted the
poetry and accentuated the venom, and western zephyrs had harmonised the
whole with a dulcet cadence of admiration and pity. In his profession,
however, public opinion was unanimous in proclaiming him pre-eminent.
The signature of Wallace Wray--"Woll" we called him--at the corner of a
canvas lured the artist mind to praise and thanksgiving; it did more, it
loosed some sluggish thousands from speculative coffers--coffers that,
prompt enough to gape at safe investment, could stand in the face of the
divine afflatus, hermetically sealed. He had reached the peak on
Parnassus where criticism drops crippled and diagnosis wrings its hands;
his dexterity of brush had become a species of sleight-of-hand,
backgrounded by the mysterious tissue of philosophy, science, and
emotion, which, commonly called genius, defies ken or comparison.

He had been a singular youth, the solitary output of one of Nature's
quaintest moulds, and from what I learnt, the singularity had become
pronounced rather than mellowed by the glaze of time. Yet, as I
remembered him--it was five years since we had met--he was an excellent
fellow, a mass of incongruity, courageous, sensitive--morbidly
so--modest, with a humility deduced from keen self-knowledge, a generous
companion and a witty, dispensing the fine flavour of his humour through
a countenance as nearly classical as individuality of expression would
permit.

This countenance now showed its presentment on the Academy walls. It was
this portrait, done by his own hand, which roused my admiration and
awoke a greed for more of him. Around