the
beautiful fair face of the Mary of the Assumption, with the waves of her
golden hair lying upon her shoulders, and the light of an eternal sun
shining down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted
by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the
compensation or the curse which is called genius. No one knew it; he as
little as any. No one knew it. Only, indeed, Patrasche, who, being with
him always, saw him draw with chalk upon the stones any and every thing
that grew or breathed, heard him on his little bed of hay murmur all
manner of timid, pathetic prayers to the spirit of the great master;
watched his gaze darken and his face radiate at the evening glow of
sunset or the rosy rising of the dawn; and felt many and many a time the
tears of a strange, nameless pain and joy, mingled together, fall hotly
from the bright young eyes upon his own wrinkled yellow forehead.

"I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that when
thou growest a man thou couldst own this hut and the little plot of
ground, and labor for thyself, and be called Baas by thy neighbours,"
said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed. For to own a bit of
soil, and to be called Baas (master) by the hamlet round, is to have
achieved the highest ideal of a Flemish peasant; and the old soldier,
who had wandered over all the earth in his youth, and had brought
nothing back, deemed in his old age that to live and die on one spot in
contented humility was the fairest fate he could desire for his darling.
But Nello said nothing.

The same leaven was working in him that in other times begat Rubens and
Jordaens and the Van Eycks, and all their wondrous tribe, and in times
more recent begat in the green country of the Ardennes, where the Meuse
washes the old walls of Dijon, the great artist of the Patroclus, whose
genius is too near us for us aright to measure its divinity.

Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little
rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas
by neighbours a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The
cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening
skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, said other things to him than
this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike, his
fancies in the dog's ear when they went together at their work through
the fogs of the daybreak, or lay together at thei