ber had fallen
upon it, and lent it a strange likeness to life.

He began to examine it. He moistened a sponge with water, passed it over
the picture several times, washed off nearly all the accumulated and
incrusted dust and dirt, hung it on the wall before him, wondering yet
more at the remarkable workmanship. The whole face had gained new life,
and the eyes gazed at him so that he shuddered; and, springing back,
he exclaimed in a voice of surprise: "It looks with human eyes!" Then
suddenly there occurred to him a story he had heard long before from his
professor, of a certain portrait by the renowned Leonardo da Vinci, upon
which the great master laboured several years, and still regarded as
incomplete, but which, according to Vasari, was nevertheless deemed by
all the most complete and finished product of his art. The most finished
thing about it was the eyes, which amazed his contemporaries; the very
smallest, barely visible veins in them being reproduced on the canvas.

But in the portrait now before him there was something singular. It was
no longer art; it even destroyed the harmony of the portrait; they were
living, human eyes! It seemed as though they had been cut from a living
man and inserted. Here was none of that high enjoyment which takes
possession of the soul at the sight of an artist's production, no matter
how terrible the subject he may have chosen.

Again he approached the portrait, in order to observe those wondrous
eyes, and perceived, with terror, that they were gazing at him. This
was no copy from Nature; it was life, the strange life which might have
lighted up the face of a dead man, risen from the grave. Whether it was
the effect of the moonlight, which brought with it fantastic thoughts,
and transformed things into strange likenesses, opposed to those of
matter-of-fact day, or from some other cause, but it suddenly became
terrible to him, he knew not why, to sit alone in the room. He draw back
from the portrait, turned aside, and tried not to look at it; but his
eye involuntarily, of its own accord, kept glancing sideways towards it.
Finally, he became afraid to walk about the room. It seemed as though
some one were on the point of stepping up behind him; and every time
he turned, he glanced timidly back. He had never been a coward; but his
imagination and nerves were sensitive, and that evening he could not
explain his involuntary fear. He seated himself in one corner, but even
then it se