There were six of them,—­six dainty miniature portraits on ivory, elaborately finished, and full of the finest marks of talent.  The whole were seemingly reproductions of but two heads, a lady’s and a child’s,—­the lady well fitted to be the mother of the child, which might well have been divine.  There were three studies of each; each was presented in three characters, chosen as by an artist possessed of a sentiment of sadness, some touching reminiscence.

In one picture, the lady—­evidently English, a pensive blonde, with large and most sweet blue eyes curtained by the longest lashes, regular and refined features suggestive of pure blood, budding lips full of sensibility, a chin and brow that showed intellect as well as lineage, and cheeks touched with the young rose’s tint—­was as a beautiful debutante, the flower of rich drawing-rooms, in her first season:  one white moss-rosebud in her smoothly-braided hair; her dimpled, round, white shoulders left to their own adornment; and for jewels, only one opal on her ripening bosom;—­as much of her dress as was shown was the simple white bodice of pure maidenhood.

In the next, she had passed an interval of trial, for her courage, her patience, and her pride,—­a very few years, perhaps, but enough to bestow that haughty, defiant glance, and fix those matchless features in an almost sneer.  No longer was her fair head bowed, her eyes downcast, in shrinking diffidence; but erect and commanding, she looked some tyranny, or insolence, or malice, in the face, to look it down.  Jewels encircled her brow, and a bouquet of pearls was happy on her fuller bosom.

Still a few years further on,—­and how changed!  “So have I seen a rose,” says that Shakspeare of the pulpit, old Jeremy Taylor, when it has “bowed the head and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it has fallen into the portion of weeds and outworn faces.”  Alas, Farewell, and Nevermore sighed from those hollow cheeks, those woebegone eyes, those pallid lips, that willow-like long hair, and the sad vesture of the forsaken Dido.

So with the child.  At first, a rosy, careless, curly-pate of three years or so,—­wonder-eyed and eager, all spring and joyance, and beautiful as Love.

Then pale and pain-fretted, heavy-eyed and weary, feebly half-lying in a great chair, still,—­an unheeded locket scarce held by his thin fingers, his forehead wrinkled with cruel twinges, the sweet bowed lines of his lips twisted in whimpering puckers, the curls upon his vein-traced temples unnaturally bright, as with clamminess,—­a painful picture for a mother’s eyes!

But not tragic, like the last; for there the boy had grown.  Nine years had deepened for his clustered curls their hue of golden brown, and set a seal of anxious thought upon the cold, pale surface of his intellectual brow, and traced his mouth about with lines of a martyr’s resignation, and filled his profound eyes, dim as violets, with foreboding speculation, making the lad seem a seer of his own sad fate.  Here, thought I, if I mistake not, is another melancholy chapter in this San Franciscan romance.  This painter learned his art of Sorrow, and pitiless Experience has bestowed his style; he shall be for my finding-out.