the old workers whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six
hundred years after the original performance had ceased and
the performers passed into the unseen. By means of a strip of
lead called a leaden tape, which he pressed around and into
the fillets and hollows with his finger and thumb, he
transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing,
that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were
also a sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and
other mathematical instruments. When he had marked down the
line thus fixed, he returned to the doorway to copy another as
before.

It being the month of August, when the pale face of the
townsman and the stranger is to be seen among the brown skins
of remotest uplanders, not only in England, but throughout the
temperate zone, few of the homeward-bound labourers paused to
notice him further than by a momentary turn of the head. They
had beheld such gentlemen before, not exactly measuring the
church so accurately as this one seemed to be doing, but
painting it from a distance, or at least walking round the
mouldy pile. At the same time the present visitor, even
exteriorly, was not altogether commonplace. His features were
good, his eyes of the dark deep sort called eloquent by the
sex that ought to know, and with that ray of light in them
which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of all kinds,--
in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he would
have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore
contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was
conceivably owing to a too dominant speculative activity in
him, which, while it had preserved the emotional side of his