ered, roughly. "Miss Annie," he added, in
imitation of my manner, "supposin' I see you home?"

But I pushed past him and went out of the store with her.

"He says I am to be his little wife by-and-by," said Annie, a most
unusual expression of disgust and alarm ruffling the quiet serenity of
her face; "but that can never be, unless I wish it, can it, Sandy?"

"I should think not, indeed," I answered, smiling at her earnestness.
"When he speaks of it again, tell him I want you myself."

"That would be a good way to stop him," she replied, accepting
graciously this solution of her present difficulty.

CHAPTER VI.

Miss Darry, knowing I could borrow books at Hillside, and that those
which I already possessed were the old English classics, bought for me
in the city only a Greek Grammar, through whose intricacies she proposed
to be my guide, and a box of water-colors, and brought to me some lives
of the old painters from Miss Merton's library.

She bewildered my mind by telling me of all there was in store for it in
the way of work and study. Her interest in my progress seemed to have
received a new impetus from her visit in town. She described the rooms
where were casts of legs and arms, heads and groups of figures, to which
I might one day have access, with the privilege of copying; and in
return I showed her two crayon sketches I had made in her absence.
Michel Angelo might have relished the knotty, muscular development of
the arm I showed her first. If there is beauty and satisfaction in
coarse brute strength, this member of my master's body was worthy of all
praise. On another sheet I had drawn, by way of contrast, Annie's
delicately small and fair, but round, arm and hand, which might have
served in her infancy as models for those of one of Raphael's cherubs.
She liked them both, and said that I should do as well, perhaps, in the
school of Nature as anywhere, for the present.

She desired me to become a sculptor, for form appealed more strongly to
her nature than color; and it seemed to be tacitly decided between us
that Art was to be my vocation. She thought that my strong hands,
accustomed to labor, could hew my own idea out of the marble for the
present, and save the expense of workmen. And then she described to me
the beautiful marbles she had seen abroad, where the artist's
inspiration was so chastely uttered by the purity of his material,
declaring that a subject which coloring would debase might be wort