Heron had listened eagerly to his son's rhapsody, but he now cast a timid
glance at the table where the wax and tools lay, pushed the rough hair
from his brow, and broke in with a bitter laugh: "My dream, do you say--
my dream? As if I did not know too well that I am no longer the man to
create an Atlas! As if I did not feel, without your words, that my
strength for it is a thing of the past!"

"Nay, father," exclaimed the painter. "Is it right to cast away the
sword before the battle? And even if you did not succeed--"

"You would be all the better pleased," the sculptor put in. "What surer
way could there be to teach the old simpleton, once for all, that the
time when he could do great work is over and gone?"

"That is unjust, father; that is unworthy of you," the young man
interrupted in great excitement; but his father went on, raising his
voice; "Silence, boy! One thing at any rate is left to me, as you know--
my keen eyes; and they did not fail me when you two looked at each other
as the starling cried, 'My strength!' Ay, the bird is in the right when
he bewails what was once so great and is now a mere laughing-stock. But
you--you ought to reverence the man to whom you owe your existence and
all you know; you allow yourself to shrug your shoulders over your own
father's humbler art, since your first pictures were fairly successful.
--How puffed up he is, since, by my devoted care, he has been a painter!
How he looks down on the poor wretch who, by the pinch of necessity, has
come down from being a sculptor of the highest promise to being a mere
gem-cutter! In the depths of your soul--and I know it--you regard my
laborious art as half a handicraft. Well, perhaps it deserves no better
name; but that you--both of you--should make common cause with a bird,
and mock the sacred fire which still burns in an old man, and moves him