n executed with more than ordinary finish and
fidelity. For all this, however, there was more of promise than of
achievement in the work. The lights were scattered; the attitudes were
stiff; there was too evident an attempt at effect. One could see that it
was the work of a young painter, who had yet much to learn, and
something of the Academy to forget.

"Well," said Mueller, still sitting ruefully on the floor, "what do you
think of it? Am I rightly served? Shall I send for a big pail of
whitewash, and blot it all out?"

"Not for the world!"

"What shall I do, then?"

"Do better."

"But, if I have done my best already?"

"Still do better; and when you have done that, do better again. So
genius toils higher and ever higher, and like the climber of the
glacier, plants his foot where only his hand clung the moment before."

"Humph! but what of my picture?"

"Well," I said, hesitatingly, "I am no critic--"

"Thank Heaven!" muttered Mueller, parenthetically.

"But there is something noble in the disposition of the figures. I
should say, however, that you had set to work upon too large a scale."

"A question of focus," said the painter, hastily. "A mere question of
focus."

"How can that be, when you have finished some parts laboriously, and in
others seem scarcely to have troubled yourself to cover the canvas?"

"I don't know. I'm impatient, you see, and--and I think I got tired of
it towards the last."

"Would that have been the case if you had allowed yourself but half the
space?"

"I'll take to enamel," exclaimed Mueller, with a grin of hyperbolical
despair. "I'll immortalize myself in miniature. I'll paint henceforward
with the aid of a microscope, and never again look at nature unless
through the wrong end of a telescope!"

"Pshaw!--be in earnest, man, and talk sensibly! Do you conceive that for
every failure you are to change your style? Give yourself, heart and
soul, to the school in which you have begun, and make up your mind
to succeed."

"Do you believe, then, that a man may succeed by force of will alone?"
said Mueller, musingly.

"Yes, because force of will proceeds from force of character, and the
two together, warp and woof, make the stuff out of which Nature clothes
her heroes."

"Oh, but I am not talking of heroes," said Mueller.

"By heroes, I do not mean only soldiers. Captain Pen is as good a hero
as Captain Sword, any day; and Captain Brush, to my thinking, is as fine
a fello