it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor.  Here and there, doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker.  All this was what friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities (of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence.  His appearance enforced these impressions—­his handsome face, his radiant, unaverted eyes, his childish, unmodulated voice.  Afterwards, when those who loved him were in tears, there was something in all this unspotted comeliness that seemed to lend a mockery to the causes of their sorrow.

Certainly, among the young men of genius who, for so many ages, have gone up to Rome to test their powers, none ever made a fairer beginning than Roderick.  He rode his two horses at once with extraordinary good fortune; he established the happiest modus vivendi betwixt work and play.  He wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio, and chattered half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms.  It all seemed part of a kind of divine facility.  He was passionately interested, he was feeling his powers; now that they had thoroughly kindled in the glowing aesthetic atmosphere of Rome, the ardent young fellow should be pardoned for believing that he never was to see the end of them.  He enjoyed immeasurably, after the chronic obstruction of home, the downright act of production.  He kept models in his studio till they dropped with fatigue; he drew, on other days, at the Capitol and the Vatican, till his own head swam with his eagerness, and his limbs stiffened with the cold.  He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called an “Adam,” and was pushing it rapidly toward completion.  There were naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy, and cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity, a capital recruit to the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk.  They were right, but Roderick was right too, for the success of his statue was not to have been foreseen; it partook, really, of the miraculous.  He never surpassed it afterwards, and a good judge here and there has been known to pronounce it the finest piece of sculpture of our modern era.  To Rowland it seemed to justify superbly his highest hopes of his friend, and he said to himself that if he had invested his happiness in fostering a genius, he ought now to be in possession of a boundless complacency.  There was something especially confident and masterly in the artist’s negligence of all such small picturesque accessories as might serve to label his figure to a vulgar apprehension.  If it represented the father of the human race and the primal embodiment of human sensation, it did so in virtue of its look