drawn an ottoman and seated
herself.

To-day, an air of unwonted negligence marked her appearance, usually
distinguished by extraordinary care and taste.

Her white merino _robe de chambre_ was partially ungirded, and the
blue tassels trailed on the carpet; her luxuriant hair instead of
being braided and classically coiled, was gathered in three or four
large heavy loops, and fastened rather loosely by the massive silver
comb that allowed one long tress to straggle across her shoulder,
while the folds in front slipped low on her temples and forehead.

Intently contemplating her work, she leaned her cheek on her hand, and
only the profile was visible from the door, as she repeated, in a
subdued tone,--

"I stanch with ice my burning breast,
With silence balm my whirling brain,
O Brandan! to this hour of rest,
That Joppan leper's ease was pain."

The easel held the largest of many pictures, upon which she had
lavished time and study, and her present work was a wide stretch of
mid-ocean, lighted by innumerable stars, and a round glittering polar
moon that swung mid-heaven like a globe of silver, and shed a ghostly
lustre on the raging, ragged waves, above which an Aurora Borealis
lifted its gleaming arch of mysterious white fires.

On the flowery shore of a tropic isle, under clustering boughs of lime
and citron, knelt the venerable figure of Saint Brandan,--and upon a
towering, jagged iceberg, whose crystal cliffs and diamond peaks
glittered with the ghastly radiance reflected from arctic moon and
boreal flames, lay Judas, pressing his hot palms and burning breast to
the frigid bosom of his sailing sapphire berg.

No hideous, scowling, red-haired arch-apostate was this painted
Iscariot,--but a handsome man, whose features were startlingly like
those in the ivory miniature.

It was a wild, dreary, mournful picture, suggestive of melancholy
mediaeval myths, and most abnormal phantasms; and would more
appropriately have draped the walls of some flagellating ascetic's
cell, than the luxuriously furnished room that now contained it.

Bending forward to deepen the dark circles which suffering and
remorse had worn beneath the brilliant eyes of the apostle, the lonely
artist added another verse to her quotation,--

"Once every year, when carols wake
On earth the Christmas night's repose,
Arising from the sinner's lake
I journey to these healing snows."

The motion loosened a delicate whit