u begin to compare yourself with
these men whose works you are for ever copying, with who
knows? --with Raffaelle, with Da Vinci----"

"I compare myself with them!" cries the American, interrupting
him. "I! No, mon ami, I am not quite such a fool as that. I
reverence them, I adore their memory, I bow down before their
wonderful genius"--and as he spoke he lifted his cap from his
head, suiting his action to his words--"but compare myself! --
I!" Then picking up his brush again, he added, "But the world
needs its little men as well as its great ones--at any rate,
the little ones need their _pot au feu;_ so to work again.
_Allons, ma petite_, your head a little more this way."

This little conversation, which occurred nearly at the
beginning of their acquaintance, the painter's words and
manner, his energy, his simple, dignified gesture as he raised
his cap--all made a great impression on our Madelon; it was
indeed one of her first lessons in that hero-worship whereby
lesser minds are brought into _rapport_ with great ones; and,
even while they reverence afar off, exultingly feel that they
in some sort share in their genius through their power of
appreciating it. Nor was it her last lesson of the same kind.

Her second friend was an old German violinist, who inhabited
two little rooms at the top of the big house, a tall, broad-
shouldered, stooping man, whose thick yellow hair and
moustache, plentifully mixed with grey, blue eyes, and fair
complexion, testified to his nationality, as did his queer,
uncouth accent, though he has spent at least two-thirds of his
life in Florence. He was an old friend of the American
painter's, and paid frequent visits to his studio; and it was
there he first met Madelon and her father. He did not much
affect M. Linders' company, but he took a fancy to the child,
as indeed most people did, and made her promise that she would
come and see him; and when she had once found her way, and
been welcomed to his little bare room, where an old piano, a
violin, and heaps of dusty folios of music, were the principal
furniture, a day seldom passed without her paying him a visit.
She would perch herself at his window, which commanded a wide
view over the city, with its countless roofs, and domes, and
towers, and beyond the encircling hills, with their scattered
villas, and slopes of terraced gardens, and pines, and olives,
all under the soft blue transparent sky; and with her eyes
fixed on this sunn