with the paper peeling off the walls.  This represented, in the fashion of fifty years ago, a series of small fantastic landscapes of a hideous pattern, and the young sculptor had presumably torn it away in great scraps, in moments of aesthetic exasperation.  On a board in a corner was a heap of clay, and on the floor, against the wall, stood some dozen medallions, busts, and figures, in various stages of completion.  To exhibit them Roderick had to place them one by one on the end of a long packing-box, which served as a pedestal.  He did so silently, making no explanations, and looking at them himself with a strange air of quickened curiosity.  Most of the things were portraits; and the three at which he looked longest were finished busts.  One was a colossal head of a negro, tossed back, defiant, with distended nostrils; one was the portrait of a young man whom Rowland immediately perceived, by the resemblance, to be his deceased brother; the last represented a gentleman with a pointed nose, a long, shaved upper lip, and a tuft on the end of his chin.  This was a face peculiarly unadapted to sculpture; but as a piece of modeling it was the best, and it was admirable.  It reminded Rowland in its homely veracity, its artless artfulness, of the works of the early Italian Renaissance.  On the pedestal was cut the name—­Barnaby Striker, Esq.  Rowland remembered that this was the appellation of the legal luminary from whom his companion had undertaken to borrow a reflected ray, and although in the bust there was naught flagrantly set down in malice, it betrayed, comically to one who could relish the secret, that the features of the original had often been scanned with an irritated eye.  Besides these there were several rough studies of the nude, and two or three figures of a fanciful kind.  The most noticeable (and it had singular beauty) was a small modeled design for a sepulchral monument; that, evidently, of Stephen Hudson.  The young soldier lay sleeping eternally, with his hand on his sword, like an old crusader in a Gothic cathedral.

Rowland made no haste to pronounce; too much depended on his judgment. 
“Upon my word,” cried Hudson at last, “they seem to me very good.”

And in truth, as Rowland looked, he saw they were good.  They were youthful, awkward, and ignorant; the effort, often, was more apparent than the success.  But the effort was signally powerful and intelligent; it seemed to Rowland that it needed only to let itself go to compass great things.  Here and there, too, success, when grasped, had something masterly.  Rowland turned to his companion, who stood with his hands in his pockets and his hair very much crumpled, looking at him askance.  The light of admiration was in Rowland’s eyes, and it speedily kindled a wonderful illumination on Hudson’s handsome brow.  Rowland said at last, gravely, “You have only to work!”