“How absurd!” exclaimed Mary Ashburton, with a smile that passed through the misty air of Flemming’s thoughts, like a sunbeam; “For one, I succeed much better in straight lines than in any others.  Here I have been trying a half-hour to make this water-wheel round; and round it never will be.”

“Then let it remain as it is.  It looks uncommonly picturesque, and may pass for a new invention.”

The lady continued to sketch, and Flemming to gaze at her beautiful face; often repeating to himself those lines in Marlow’s Faust;

“O thou art fairer than the evening air,

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!”

He certainly would have betrayed himself to the maternal eye of Mrs. Ashburton, had she not been wholly absorbed in the follies of a fashionable novel.  Ere long the fair sketcher had paused for a moment; and Flemming had taken her sketch-book in his hands and was looking it through from the beginning with ever-increasing delight, half of which he dared not express, though he favored her with some comments and bursts of admiration.

“This is truly a very beautiful sketch of Murten and the battle-field!  How quietly the land-scape sleeps there by the lake, after the battle!  Did you ever read the ballad of Veit Weber, the shoe-maker, on this subject?  He says, the routed Burgundians jumped into the lake, and the Swiss Leaguers shot them down like wild ducks among the reeds.  He fought in the battle and wrote the ballad afterwards;—­

’He had himself laid hand on sword,

He who this rhyme did write;

Till evening mowed he with the sword,

And sang the song at night.’”

“You must give me the whole ballad,” said Miss Ashburton; “it will serve to illustrate the sketch.”

“And the sketch to illustrate the ballad.  And now we suddenly slide down the Alps into Italy, and are even in Rome, if I mistake not.  This is surely a head of Homer?”

“Yes,” replied the lady, with a little enthusiasm.  “Do you not remember the marble bust at Rome?  When I first beheld that bust, it absolutely inspired me with awe.  It is not the face of a man, but of a god!”

“And you have done it no injustice in your copy,” said Flemming, catching a new enthusiasm from hers.  “With what a classic grace the fillet, passing round the majestic forehead, confines his flowing locks, which mingle with his beard!  The countenance, too, is calm, majestic, godlike!  Even the fixed and sightless eyeballs do not mar the imageof the seer!  Such were the sightless eyes of the blind old man of Chios.  They seem to look with mournful solemnity into the mysterious future; and the marble lips to repeat that prophetic passage in the Hymn to Apollo; ’Let me also hope to be remembered in ages to come.  And when any one, born of the tribes of men, comes hither, a weary traveller, and inquires, who is the sweetest of the Singing Men, that resort to your feasts, and whom you most delight to hear, do you make answer for me.  It is the Blind Man, who dwells in Chios; his songs excel all that can ever be sung!’ But do you really believe, that this is a portrait of Homer?”