The man has the face of a child:  cloud and sunshine pass rapidly over it.  Pleasure and chagrin, sometimes anger, oftener joy, flit across it, swiftly as the flashing of a meteor.  While I was making this explanation, he looked at me with a searching scrutiny,—­at first angrily, then sadly, as if he were going to cry; but when I finished, he took my hand in both of his, and said, very seriously,—­

“You are welcome just the same.”

Soon he commenced laughing:  the oddity of the affair was just beginning to strike him.  After conversing awhile, he said,—­

“Ah, we shall like each other,—­shall we not?  Where do you stay?  You shall come and live with me.  But will that content you?  Have you seen enough of the outside of Munich?”

I really knew not what to make of so unexpected a demonstration.  Should I accept his invitation, so entirely a stranger as I was?  Why not?  M—–­y was in earnest; he meant what he said; yet I hesitated.

“You need feel no embarrassment,” he said, kindly.  “I really want you to come,—­unless, indeed, it is not agreeable to you.”

“A thousand thanks!” I exclaimed,—­“I will come.”

“Not a single one,” said M—–­y.  “Go and arrange affairs at your hotel, and make haste back for dinner:  it will be served in an hour.”

The next day I was domesticated in M—–­y’s house.

I have not the present design to give any account of him.  Should the reader find anything in what is written to interest or attract, it is possible that in a future number a chapter may be devoted to the great artist of Munich.  Now, however, I remark simply, that the gossip and strange stories and incidents and other et ceteras told of him proved to be ridiculous creations, with scarcely a shadow to rest on, having their inception in M—–­y’s peculiarities,—­peculiarities which originated from an entire and absolute independence of thought and manner and conduct.  A grown-up man in intellect, experience, and sagacity,—­a child in simplicity and feeling, and in the effect produced by the forms and ceremonies and conventionalities of life:  these seemed always to astonish him, and he never, as he said, could understand why people should live with masks over their faces, when they would breathe so much freer and be so much more at their ease by taking them off.  This was the man who invited me to come to his house,—­and who would not have given the invitation, had he not wanted me to accept it.

I have spoken of three paintings which excited my attention the day I paid my first visit.  These were masterpieces,—­three portraits, not life-like, but life itself.  They did not attract by the perpetual stare of the eyes following one, whichever way one turned, as in many pictures; in these the eyes were not thrown on the spectator.  One portrait was that of a man of at least fifty:  an intellectual head; eyes, I know not what they were,—­fierce, defiant, hardly human, but earthly, devilish; a mouth