. Brown
and abundant, also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and
was rather under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this
mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or
gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend,
George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her
private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and
George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not
going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with the
fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies as well
as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is afterwards all the
sweeter and softer. No people could be more good, honest, and kind than
the Thompsons.

There was no other artist in Rome who could paint as well as Mr.
Thompson. That portrait of my father, to which reference has been made,
which now hangs in my house, looks even better, as a painting, to-day
than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not have laid
on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for the hues of
life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never learned how to
draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent in his portraits
as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful, significant, full
of feeling and character; but they betrayed a weakness of anatomical
knowledge and of perspective. They had not the conventional
incorrectness of the old masters preceding Raphael, but an incorrectness
belonging personally to Thompson; it was not excessive or conspicuous to
any one, and certainly not to Thompson himself. But his color redeemed
all and made his pictures permanently valuable. He was at this time
painting a picture of Saint Peter being visited by an angel, which
was rich and beautiful; and he had some sketches of a series based on
Shakespeare's Tempest; and standing on one side in the studio was a
glowing figure of a woman in Oriental costume, an odalisque, or
some such matter, which showed that his sympathy with life was not
a restricted one. Later in our acquaintance he fell in love with the
bright Titian hair of my sister Rose, and made a little portrait of her,
which was one of his best likenesses, apart from its admirable color; it
even showed the tears in the child's eyes, gathering there by reason of
her antipathy to posing.

Cora Thompson, the da