Sixth Avenue, where Carstairs painted pictures and Mrs. Carstairs
mended stockings and wrote letters home to her people in Vermont.
Young Carstairs had had a picture in the Salon, and was getting one
ready for the Academy, which he hoped to have accepted if he lived
long enough to finish it. They were very poor. Not so poor that there
was any thought of Carstairs starving to death, but there was at least
a possibility that he would not be able to finish his picture in the
studio, for which he could not pay the rent. He was very young and had
no business to marry; but she was willing, and her people had an idea
it would come out all right. They had only three hundred dollars left,
and it was mid-winter.

Carstairs went out to sketch Broadway at One Hundred and Fifty-ninth
Street, where it is more of a country road than anything else, and his
hands almost froze while he was getting down the black lines of the
bare trees, and the deep, irregular ruts in the road, where the mud
showed through the snow. He intended to put a yellow sky behind this,
and a house with smoke coming out of the chimney, and with red light
shining through the window, and call it _Winter_.

A horse and buggy stopped just back of him, and he was conscious from
the shadows on the snow that the driver was looking down from his
perch.

Carstairs paid no attention to his spectator. He was used to working
with Park policemen and nursery-maids looking over his shoulder and
making audible criticisms or giggling hysterically. So he sketched on
and became unconscious of the shadow falling on the snow in front of
him; and when he looked up about a quarter of an hour later and
noticed that the shadow was still there, he smiled at the tribute such
mute attention paid his work. When the sketch was finished he leaned
back and closed one eye, and moved his head from side to side and
surveyed it critically. Then he heard a voice over his shoulder say,
in sympathetic tones, "Purty good, isn't it?" He turned and smiled at
his critic, and found him to be a fat, red-faced old gentleman,
wrapped in a great fur coat with fur driving-gloves and fur cap.

"You didn't mind my watching you, did you?" asked the old gentleman.

Carstairs said no, he did not mind. The other said that it must be
rather cold drawing in such weather, and Carstairs said yes, it was;
but that you couldn't get winter and snow in June.

"Exactly," said the driver; "you've got to take it as it com