ER'S EYES.

On looking at the picture, the next day, Bella was painfully
dissatisfied with her work. What she had done with so much care and
diligence seemed to her false in drawing and expression. She grew
positively angry over it, and would have made a fresh beginning had not
Clodwig, by his gentle persuasions and judicious praise of the many
excellencies of her picture, succeeded in soothing her. She could not
help saying, however, with some bitterness, that it was her fate to
have everything she undertook turn out otherwise than she had desired,
and upon Clodwig's assuring her that such was the necessary result of
every attempt to embody our conceptions, she exclaimed impatiently, "I
am not what I am." The real cause of her discontent was hard to
determine. It was more than the mere dissatisfaction of the artist and
disappointment in her own powers.

The strict discipline which Eric had wished to maintain was now much
broken in upon. Bella always carried through whatever plan she had laid
out for herself, acting upon her favorite theory that it was well to
allow men to think they had some authority, but that must be all.

Roland soon turned the conversation to the subject always uppermost in
his mind, the life of Franklin. Bella expressed a wish to learn
something about it, and Clodwig, after a little sketch had been given
of what bad been already gone over, was quite ready to resume the
reading where it had been dropped before. Eric and Roland, who sat upon
a raised platform, listened eagerly. The reading gave rise to many an
animated discussion, for Bella entered with remarkable ease and
readiness into everything that was presented to her. Eric was disturbed
by her speedy detection in Franklin of "a certain dry pedantry, a
stinginess of nature," which her acute criticisms set forth in strong
relief. He could feel the emotion her words caused in Roland, who was
sitting on his knee.

In these days, it is impossible for a young man of Roland's antecedents
and present position to preserve a perfect ideal. If rightly guided,
and established on a solid footing, it might perhaps be useful for him
to see his ideal attacked, and even distorted.

With all the eloquence at his command, Eric stated the difficulty that
beset the enlightened mind of the present day, in having no
authoritative voice in the place of that of the Church, to say at every
point of life's journey, "Follow thou me." We moderns must recognize
wh