ely. "But the time doesn't go the way it does in the summer."

"Oh, I know how the country is in the winter," he said. "I was brought up
in the country."

"I didn't know that," she said, and she gave him a stare of surprise
before her eyes fell.

"Yes. Out in Wisconsin. My people were emigrants, and I lived in the
woods, there, till I began to paint my way out. I began pretty early, but
I was in the woods till I was sixteen."

"I didn't know that," she repeated. "I always thought that you were--"

"Summer folks, like the rest? No, I'm all-the-year-round folks
originally. But I haven't been in the country in the winter since I was a
boy; and it's all been coming back to me, here, like some one else's
experience."

She did not say anything, but the interest in her eyes, which she could
not keep from his face now, prompted him to go on.

"You can make a beginning in the West easier than you can in the East,
and some people who came to our lumber camp discovered me, and gave me a
chance to begin. I went to Milwaukee first, and they made me think I was
somebody. Then I came on to New York, and they made me think I was
nobody. I had to go to Europe to find out which I was; but after I had
been there long enough I didn't care to know. What I was trying to do was
the important thing to me; not the fellow who was trying to do it."

"Yes," she said, with intelligence.

"I met some Boston people in Italy, and I thought I should like to live
where that kind of people lived. That's the way I came to be in Boston.
It all seems very simple now, but I used to think it might look romantic
from the outside. I've had a happy life; and I'm glad it began in the
country. I shouldn't care if it ended there. I don't know why I've
bothered you with my autobiography, though. Perhaps because I thought you
knew it already."

She looked as if she would have said something fitting if she could have
ruled herself to it; but she said nothing at all. Her failure seemed to
abash her, and she could only ask him if he would not have some more
coffee, and then excuse herself, and leave him to finish his breakfast
alone.

That day he tried for his picture from several points out-of-doors before
he found that his own window gave him the best. With the window open, and
the stove warm at his back, he worked there in great comfort nearly every
afternoon. The snows kept off, and the clear sunsets burned behind the
summit day after day. He painted fr