is cell, by the light of his
lamp. But his bodily energies wasted and declined under incessant toil.
There was none sufficiently interested in the poor artist, to mark the
feverish hue of his wrinkled cheek, or the increasing attenuation of his
misshapen frame.

None observed that the uninviting pittance set aside for his midday
repast, remained for several days untouched. Samuel made his appearance
regularly as ever, and bore with the same meekness the gibes of his
fellow-pupils, or the taunts of Madame Durer, and worked with the same
untiring assiduity, though his hands would sometimes tremble, and his eyes
become suffused, a weakness probably owing to the excessive use he had
made of them.

One morning Duhobret was missing at the scene of his daily labors. His
absence created much remark, and many were the jokes passed upon the
occasion. One surmised this, and another that, as the cause of the
phenomenon; and it was finally agreed that the poor fellow must have
worked himself into an absolute skeleton, and taken his final stand in the
glass frame of some apothecary, or been blown away by a puff of wind,
while his door happened to stand open. No on thought of going to his
lodgings to look after him or his remains.

Meanwhile, the object of their mirth was tossing on a bed of sickness.
Disease, which had been slowly sapping the foundations of his strength,
burned in every vein; his eyes rolled and flashed in delirium; his lips,
usually so silent, muttered wild and incoherent words. In his days of
health, poor Duhobret had his dreams, as all artists, rich or poor, will
sometimes have. He had thought that the fruit of many years' labor,
disposed of to advantage, might procure him enough to live, in an
economical way, for the rest of his life. He never anticipated fame or
fortune; the height of his ambition or hope was, to possess a tenement
large enough to shelter him from the inclemencies of the weather, with
means enough to purchase one comfortable meal per day.

Now, alas! however, even that one hope had deserted him. He thought
himself dying, and thought it hard to die without one to look kindly upon
him, without the words of comfort that might soothe his passage to another
world. He fancied his bed surrounded by fiendish faces, grinning at his
sufferings, and taunting his inability to summon power to disperse them.
At length the apparition faded away, and the patient sunk into an
exhausted slumber.

He awoke u