and seemed to support her husband's wealth and luxurious style of
living with the greatest fortitude and resignation, never complaining
of her comforts, nor murmuring a wish for living in a cottage.




THE CAREER OF AN ARTIST.

I woke up one morning and found myself
famous.--BYRON.


Julian Montfort was a farmer's boy; bred up to the plough handle and
cart tail. His father and mother were plain, honest people, of
hard-working habits and limited ideas, and without the slightest dash
of romance in their temperaments. Their house, their lands were
unprepossessing in appearance. The soil was impoverished by long and
illiberal culture; and old Montfort had a true old-fashioned prejudice
against trees. Instead of smiling hedgerows, with here and there a
weeping elm or plumy evergreen to cast their graceful shadows upon the
pasture land, his acres were enclosed with harsh stone walls, or an
unpicturesque Virginia fence with its zigzag of rude rails. The farmer
had an equal prejudice against books, "book larnin', and book-larned
men." Of course, with these ideas, Julian's education was limited to a
few quarters' schooling under an old pedagogue, whose native language
was Dutch, and who never took very kindly to the English tongue.
Besides, teaching was only an episode with him; for his vocation was
that of a clergyman, and he held forth on Sundays in alternate Dutch
and English to his little congregation--as is still the custom in many