“She is not any one we ever saw;—­she never lived.  My father made her out of his own head, as I make stories sometimes; or he dreamed her, or saw her in the fire.  But he is very fond of her, I suppose, because he made her himself,—­just as I think my own stories prettier than any true ones; and he’s always drawing 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 hair—­as a fidgety and vulgar man would bite his nails.  From all of which I gathered that my new acquaintance was an intensely nervous person,—­very sensitive, of course, and no doubt irritable.