And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.—­What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man’s memory of a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.

If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman’s face, the words with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.

—­If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!—­he said.—­All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you don’t want to see.—­The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.

How many drawing-books have you filled,—­I said,—­since you began to take lessons?—­This was the first,—­she answered,—­since she was here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size she had covered with drawings.

I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies, principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a superb drawing of an arm!  I don’t remember it among the figures from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.  From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.—­Oh!

—­Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,—­I said, taking up the drawing-book with a lock on it,—­Yes,—­she said.—­I should like to see her style of working on a small scale.—­There was nothing in it worth showing,—­she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven’t the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady’s daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,—­somebody