g her, and drawing her, and drawing
her. I love her, too, very much,--she looks so natural, and has such
nice ways. Isn't it strange my father--but he's _so_ clever with his
pencil and brushes!--should be able to invent the Lady Angelica?
--that's her name. But my mother does not like her at all, and
gets out of patience with my father for painting so many of her.
Mamma says she has a stuck-up expression,--such a funny word,
'stuck-up'!--and does not look like a lady. Once I told mamma I was
sure she was only jealous, and she grew very angry, and made me cry;
so now I never speak of Lady Angelica before her. What makes me think
my father must have dreamed her is that I dreamed her once myself. I
thought she came to me in such a splendid dress, and told me that she
was not only a live lady, but my own mother, and that mamma was----
Hush! This is my father, Sir."

Wonderful! how the lad had changed!--like a phantom, the thoughtless
prattler was gone in a moment, and in his place stood the seer-boy of
the picture, the profound foreboding eyes fixed anxiously, earnestly,
on the singular man who at that moment entered: a singularly small
man, cheaply but tidily attired in black; even his shoes polished,--a
rare and dandyish indulgence in San Francisco, before the French
bootblacks inaugurated the sumptuary vanity of Day and Martin's lustre
on the stoop of the California Exchange, and made it a necessity no
less than diurnal ablutions; a well-preserved English hat on his head,
which, when he with a somewhat formal air removed it, discovered thin
black locks, beginning to part company with the crown of his head. In
his large, brown eyes an expression of moving melancholy was
established; a nervous tremulousness almost twitched his refined lips,
which, to my surprise, were not concealed by the universal
moustache,--indeed, the smooth chin and symmetrically trimmed
mutton-chop whiskers, in the orthodox English mode, showed that the
man shaved. His nose, slightly aquiline, was delicately cut, and his
nostrils fine; and he had small feet and hands, the latter remarkably
white and tender. As he stood before me, he was never at rest for an
instant, but changed his support from one leg to the other,--they were
slight as a young boy's,--and fumbled, as it were, with his feet; as I
have seen a distinguished medical lecturer, of Boston, gesticulate
with his toes. He played much with his whiskers, too, and his fingers
were often in his