stocrats who cracked sly jokes at the miller's boy had
their fun.

Rembrandt usually came in late, after the master had begun his little
morning lecture. The lad was barefoot, having left his wooden shoon in
the hallway "so as not to wear out the floor." He would bow awkwardly to
the professor, fall over a chair or two that had been slyly pushed in his
way, and taking his seat chew the butt end of a brush.

"Why are you always late?" asked the master one day.

"Oh, I was working at home and forgot the time."

"And what are you working at?"

"Me? I'm--I'm drawing a little," and he colored vermilion to the back of
his neck.

"Well, bring your work here so we can profit by it," exclaimed a joker,
and the class guffawed.

The next morning the lad brought his picture--a woman's face--a picture
of a face, homely, wrinkled, weather-beaten, but with a look of love and
patience and loyalty beaming out of the quiet eyes.

"Who did this?" demanded the teacher.

Rembrandt hesitated, stuttered, stammered, and then confessed that he did
it himself--he could not tell a lie.

He was sure the picture would be criticized and ridiculed, but he had
decided to face it out. It was a picture of his mother, and he had
sketched her just as she looked. He would let them laugh, and then at
noon he would wait outside the door and smash the boy who laughed loudest
over the head with a wooden shoe--and let it go at that.

But the scholars did not laugh, for Jacob van Swanenburch took the boy by
the hand and leading him out before the class told those young men to
look upon their master.

From that time forth Rembrandt was regarded by the little art world of
Leyden as a prodigy.

Like William Cullen Bryant, who wrote "Thanatopsis" when scarcely
eighteen, and writing for sixty years thereafter never equaled it, or
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote "The Blessed Damozel" at the same age,
Rembrandt sprang into life full-armed.

It is probably true that he could not then have produced an elaborate
composition, but his faces were Rembrandtesque from the very first.

Rembrandt is the king of light and shade. You never mistake his work. As
the years passed, around him clustered a goodly company of pupils,
hundreds in all, who diligently worked to catch the trick, but Rembrandt
stands alone. "He is the only artist who could ever paint a wrinkle,"
says Ruskin. All his portraits have the warts on. And the thought has
often come to me that onl