Puslapio vaizdai
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Anson went quietly on with his work, making a living for himself and Flaxen and baby. It never occurred to either of them that any other arrangement was necessary. Kendall wrote once or twice a month for a while, saying each time," I'll come back and settle up," and asking her to come to him; but she did not reply, and never referred to him outside her home, and when others inquired after him she replied evasively :

"He's in Wisconsin somewhere; I don't know where."

"Is he coming back?"

“I don't know.”

She was meditating deeply, but what was in her mind Anson never knew. She had grown more and more reticent of late. She sighed, rose, and resumed her evening tasks.

One raw March evening, when the wind was roaring among the gray branches of the maples like a lion in wrath, some one knocked on the door.

"Come in!" shouted Anson, who was giving baby her regular ride on his boot. "Come in!" added Flaxen.

Gearheart walked in slowly, and closed the door behind his back, and stood devouring the cheerful scene. He was poorly dressed, and wore a wide, limp hat; they did not know him till he bared his head.

"Bert!" yelled Anson, tossing the baby to his shoulder, and leaping toward his chum, tramping and shaking and clapping like a madman - scaring the child.

"My gosh-all-hemlock! I'm glad to see ye! Gimme that paw again. Come to the fire. This is Flaxie" (as though he had not had his eyes on her face all the time). "Be'n sick?”

Bert's hollow cough prompted this question. "Yes. Had some kind of a fever down in Arizony. Oh, I 'm all right now," he added in reply to an anxious look from Flaxen. "An' this is—"

"Baby-Elsie," she replied, putting a finishing touch to the little one's dress, motherlike.

"Where 's he?" he asked a little later. Anson replied with a little gesture which si

She often spoke of Bert, and complained of lenced Bert at the same time that it explained. his silence. Once she said:

"I guess he 's forgot us, pap."

"I guess not. More likely he 's thinkin' we 've fergot him. He'll turn up some bright mornin' with a pocket full o' rocks. He ain't no spring chicken, Bert ain't." ("All the same, I wish t' he 'd write," Anson said to himself.)

THE sad death of Kendall came to them without much disturbing force. He had been out of their lives so long that when Anson came in with the paper and letter telling of the accident, and with his instinctive delicacy left her alone to read the news, Flaxen was awed and saddened, but had little sense of personal pain and loss.

"Young Kendall," the newspaper went on under its scare-heads, "was on a visit to La Crosse, and while skating with a party on the bayou, where the La Crosse River empties into the father of waters, skated into an air-hole. The two young ladies with him were rescued, but the fated man was swept under the ice. He was the son," etc.

When Anson came back Flaxen sat with the letter in her hand and the paper on her lap.

And when Flaxen was busy a few moments later, Anson said:

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He's gone. I'll explain later."

At the table they grew quite gay talking over old times, and Bert's pale face grew rosier, catching a reflection of the happy faces opposite.

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Say, Bert, do you remember the time you threw that pan o' biscuits I made out into the grass an' killed every dog in the township?” Then they roared.

"I remember your flapjacks that always split open in the middle, an' no amount o' heat could cook 'em inside," Bert replied.

Then they grew sober again, when Bert said with a pensive cadence: "Well, I tell ye, those were days of hard work; but many 's the time I've looked back at 'em these last three years, wishin' they 'd never ended an' that we 'd never got scattered."

"We won't be again, will we, pap? " "Not if I can help it," Anson replied. "But how are you, Bert? Rich?"

Bert put his hand into his pocket and laid a handful of small coins on the table. "That's the size o' my pile-four dollars,"

he said, smiling faintly; "the whole o' my three years' work."

"Well, never mind, ol' man. I 've got a chance fer ye. Still an old bach. ?"

"Still an old bach." He looked at Flaxen, irresistibly drawn to her face. She dropped her eyes; she could not have told why.

And so "Wood & Gearheart" was painted on the sides of the drays, and they all continued to live in the little yellow cottage, enjoying life much more than the men, at least, had ever dared to hope; and little Elsie grew to be a "great girl," and a nuisance with her desire to "yide" with "g'an'pap."

There is no spot more delightful in early April than the sunny side of the barn, and Ans' and Bert felt this though they did not say it.

The eaves were dripping, the doves cooing, the hens singing their harsh-throated, weirdly suggestive songs, and the thrilling warmth and vitality of the sun and wind of spring made the great rude fellows shudder with a strange delight. Anson held out his palm to catch the sunshine in it, took off his hat to feel the wind, and mused:

"This is a great world-and a great day. I wish t' it was always spring."

"Say," began Bert abruptly, "it seems pretty well understood that you 're her father-but where do I come in?"

"You ought to be her husband." A light leaped into the younger man's face. "But go slow," Anson went on gravely. "This package is marked 'Glass; handle with care.""

THE END.

Hamlin Garland.

ITALIAN OLD MASTERS.

BERNARDINO LUINI.-BORN,; DIED, 1533 (?).

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T is a curious commentary on the artistic discrimination of the sixteenth century that one of the sweetest of its painters was so unknown in his own day that there is no record of his birth or of his death. We know so little of Luini's life and circumstances that if we would have a biography, we must construct one from the internal evidence of his works. The first signed picture is a Madonna in the Brera Gallery of Milan, of 1521, and this seems to mark a point of departure, and serves to divide hypothetically his unripened work from that by which we estimate his powers. He has always been considered a pupil of Da Vinci, but we have no other evidence of this than the character of his work. Only six of his pictures are dated, moreover, so that we have hardly the data for an authoritative classification of them. The singular and salient fact of Luini's artistic existence is that for so many years he was so completely confounded with DaVinci that there are more of his pictures which have passed for the work of Leonardo than we have of Leonardo's own. It is possible that the fixing of his style in 1521 was a consequence of his having come into contact with Da Vinci. That he did actually profit by the instruction of the master is most probable, for the similarity of technic which has been the cause of the confusion between the two painters could hardly have come merely from a general impression of the elder painter's work. Studio traditions are to be ac

quired only in the studio; and Da Vinci had so many pupils that Luini and many others might easily escape mention. In that region and time the genius of the master so overshadowed all other talent or reputation that a man in poor circumstances, and of obscure position, such as Luini, would hardly attract the attention of a society accustomed to brilliant achievement and showy qualities, to which Luini never attained. His tender sentiment and delicate drawing are not of the kind of art which attracts the careless observer, and that his work has come down almost to our own day without the distinction it merits is the best proof that he was not of those who catch the public eye at any period.

The work supposed to be his earliest is in the Brera Gallery and the Royal Palace, Milan; it consists of a number of fragments of frescos from the Casa Pelucca near Monza. They are mostly subjects from the Old Testament, but there is a series of mythological subjects, as an Apollo and Daphne, etc. The frescos of Sta. Maria della Pace, which are now in the Brera, or in the Museum of Archæology, are supposed by Mongeri to have been painted about 1524, and to be the next in order to those of the Časa Pelucca, as they show the painter's peculiarities of style, while those of the former series vary so much as to have given the idea to Cavalcaselle that they were painted in coöperation with Suardi, whose children and those of Luini (the latter had three sons who became painters) painted in much the same manner. Luini was a poor man with a large family, and executed

a very great number of works, those of the earlier period being mostly, so far as distinguishable, in fresco, and, whether from haste, as a result of being poorly paid, or from being carried out by pupils, of very unequal execution. But he was capable of very rapid work; thus the "Flagellation" in the Ambrosiana, a fresco occupying one side of the chapter-hall, was begun in October, 1521, and finished in March of the next year. The "Flagellation" occupies the center, with portraits of six donors on each side, all excellent examples of portraiture. After 1522 Luini was called out of Milan to work, and painted in Legnano an altar-piece in fifteen compartments. In 1525 he was invited to paint in the Church of the Blessed Virgin of Saronno, near Milan, where he worked in company with Gaudenzio and two other painters; and on his return to Milan he was commissioned by the Bentivogli, the dethroned lords of Bologna, to paint the partition wall of the Church of St. Maurizio, by which they wished to show their recognition, in their exile from their own realm, of the hospitality of their kinsmen the Sforzas. One of the subjects is St. Benedict leading Alessandro Bentivoglio to the altar, and another is St. Agnes performing the same office for his wife, who was Hippolyta Sforza. In the cloister of the church he painted a series from the Passion, of which the Crucifixion was in oil.

From Milan he went again, in 1529, to Lugano, where he painted a Passion, in which the principal scenes of the Agony are enacted in the background while the Crucifixion takes place in the foreground. Dohme considers the figures of the Magdalen and St. John to be among the finest in Italian art. Here the painter introduces as a centurion the supposed portrait of himself, and as the same head occurs in another picture, the "Adoration," at Saronno, Dohme very reasonably accepts it as the authentic portrait, rejecting the traditional trait in the "Christ among the Doctors," in the Church of the Blessed Virgin of Saronno. There is record of his painting at Lugano in 1529-30 and in 1533, and the last date is the latest note of the existence of the painter.

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Ruskin deserves the credit of having been one of the earliest to give Luini full justice. He considers him a better draftsman than Da Vinci, but this is a judgment the justice of which depends on definitions. If we are to take into consideration all the qualities of the artistic expression of form, it cannot be maintained, and in subtlety of line alone it can hardly be held, for when he had a form to follow no one could surpass Da Vinci; but in the feeling for beauty of line and tender expression coupled with subtle drawing, I believe that Luini justifies the praise of the critic. W. J. Stillman.

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NOTE BY TIMOTHY COLE ON THE "ST. APOLLONIA' OF LUINI.

LUINI is seen at his best in Milan, where are found inches wide. To appreciate the full value of the coloring

his latest works—those of his third, or “blond," manner, in which he attains his fullest strength and independence. The Church of Monastero Maggiore, formerly St. Maurizio, is a very temple of his art. Luini's "blond" manner is a warmer and less heavy style of coloring than he had previously practised; the name does not imply that his frescos are any more blond, generally speaking, than those of any other artist.

The detail given, St. Apollonia, is part of one of the painter's most beautiful single-figure pieces, a fresco to the right of the high altar in the Church of Monastero Maggiore. I was much struck with the grace and ease of the pose; but the beauty of the face, so tender and full of emotion, made me wish to engrave this part alone. I have made, however, a three-quarter length, thus giving the head larger than it would have been had I done the whole figure, as well as showing the composition of the principal motive. Much of the expression of a face is necessarily lost in engraving it on a small scale on wood.

The attribute of St. Apollonia is a pair of pincers holding a tooth, in allusion to the torture she suffered in having all her teeth extracted previously to being burned. She is the patron saint of sufferers from toothache. Besides the pincers, she holds the book as significant of her learning, and she bears the martyr's palm.

one must get within the altar-railing, for the effect of the slanting light from without causes a delicate purple bloom to suffuse the whole of the surface, and this, though very beautiful, conveys a false impression. I had not suspected anything wrong until I got within the railing, when I found that the under-robe, which I had taken to be of a charming purple hue, was in fact dark brown. In like manner the other colors were more or less affected. The sleeve of the saint is pea-green, of a light, delicate, lively tone, soft and very pleasant to the eye. Her mantle which falls over her shoulder, is of a bright orange, yet neutralized to harmonize delightfully with the rest. The lining of this mantle, turned up by the elbow, is of a soft, neutral tone of blue. The lining of the robe falling beneath the arm is of the same tone of blue, but its exterior is of a fine crimson, softened and glowing. A portion of this robe falls over the left shoulder, displaying its lining of soft blue. The cover of the book is green. The background of the whole is of a soft, dark sea-green, its inner square of a soft blackish tone tinged delicately so as to suggest a reddish feeling. The hair of the saint is of a warm silvery color, and the flesh-tints are soft and warm. The combination of the whole is very delightful and charming. The best way to appreciate the beautiful glow of the picture is to stand at a little distance and to view it through a tube, shutting out all else, and thus concen

The fresco measures six feet high by two feet seven trating the vision upon it.

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