every one, and is never expected to catch cold in attending a friend's
funeral, or otherwise to sacrifice his comfort, because he is quite
certain to have important engagements elsewhere, in which the world always
believes. There is probably no individual more absolutely free and
untrammeled than the thoroughly popular man.




CHAPTER II.



Fate, the artist, mixes her own colors. She grinds them with a pestle in
the fashion of the old masters, and out of the most strange pigments she
produces often only soft neutral tints for background and shadow, kneading
a vast deal of bright colors away among the grays and browns; but now and
then she takes a palette loaded with strong paint, and a great brush, and
splashes a startling full length portrait upon the canvas, without much
regard for drawing or general composition, but with very startling effect.
To paint well needs life-long study; to paint so as merely to attract
attention needs courage and a heart hardened against artistic
sensitiveness.

John Harrington was a high light against the mezzotint of his
surroundings. He was a constant source of interest, and not infrequently
of terror, to the good town of Boston. True, he was a Bostonian himself, a
chip of the old block, whose progenitors had lived in Salem, and whose
very name breathed Pilgrim memories. He even had a teapot that had come
over in the Mayflower. This was greatly venerated, and whenever John