continual shift and play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer.

So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase. Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature.

The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell. It made him feel — what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man — how youthful he still was.

“It seems to me,” he observed, “that I never