"Oh," said Cecilia, adjusting the light, "it 's a little thing of Mr.
Hudson's."

"And who the deuce is Mr. Hudson?" asked Rowland. But he was absorbed;
he lost her immediate reply. The statuette, in bronze, something less
than two feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a gourd. The
attitude was perfectly simple. The lad was squarely planted on his feet,
with his legs a little apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head
thrown back, and both hands raised to support the rustic cup. There was
a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his head, and his eyes, under
their drooped lids, looked straight into the cup. On the base was
scratched the Greek word ;aa;gD;gi;gc;ga, Thirst. The figure might have
been some beautiful youth of ancient fable,--Hylas or Narcissus, Paris
or Endymion. Its beauty was the beauty of natural movement; nothing had
been sought to be represented but the perfection of an attitude. This
had been most attentively studied, and it was exquisitely rendered.
Rowland demanded more light, dropped his head on this side and that,
uttered vague exclamations. He said to himself, as he had said more than
once in the Louvre and the Vatican, "We ugly mortals, what beautiful
creatures we are!" Nothing, in a long time, had given him so much
pleasure. "Hudson--Hudson," he asked again; "who is Hudson?"

"A young man of this place," said Cecilia.

"A young man? How old?"

"I suppose he is three or four and twenty."

"Of this place, you say--of Northampton, Massachusetts?"