owled he, "there's nothing I hate like
confessing it. However, it has to be done--so the sooner the better.
Would you like to come with me? You'll see his studio."

I was only too glad to accompany him; for to me, as to most of us, there
was ever a nameless charm in the picturesque litter of an artist's
studio. Mueller's own studio, however, was as yet the only one I had
seen. He laughed when I said this.

"If your only notion of a studio is derived from that specimen," said
he, "you will he agreeably surprised by the contrast. He calls his place
a 'den,' but that's a metaphor. Mine is a howling wilderness."

Arriving presently at a large house at the bottom of a courtyard in the
Rue Vaugirard, he knocked at a small side-door bearing a tiny brass
plate not much larger than a visiting-card, on which was
engraved--"Monsieur Flandrin."

The door opened by some invisible means from within, and we entered a
passage dimly lighted by a painted glass door at the farther end. My
companion led the way down this passage, through the door, and into a
small garden containing some three or four old trees, a rustic seat, a
sun-dial on an antique-looking fragment of a broken column, and a little
weed-grown pond about the size of an ordinary drawing-room table,
surrounded by artificial rock-work.

At the farther extremity of this garden, filling the whole space from
wall to wall, and occupying as much ground as must have been equal to
half the original enclosure, stood a large, new, windowless building, in
shape exactly like a barn, lighted from a huge skylight in the roof, and
entered by a small door in one corner. I did not need to be told that
this was the studio.

But if the outside was like a barn, the inside was like a beautiful
mediaeval interior by Cattermole--an interior abounding in rich and
costly detail; in heavy crimson draperies, precious old Italian
cabinets, damascened armor, carved chairs with upright backs and twisted
legs, old paintings in massive Florentine frames, and strange quaint
pieces of Elizabethan furniture, like buffets, with open shelves full of
rare and artistic things--bronzes, ivory carvings, unwieldy Majolica
jars, and lovely goblets of antique Venetian glass laced with spiral
ornaments of blue and crimson and that dark emerald green of which the
secret is now lost for ever.

Then, besides all these things, there were great folios leaning piled
against the walls, one over the other; and Persian