whirlpool of actual affairs, the stricken heart finds all,--the gambling,
the inebriation, and the study.

We pause here. We have pursued long enough that patient analysis, with
all the food for reflection that it possibly affords, to which we were
insensibly led on by an interest, dark and fascinating, that grew more
and more upon us as we proceeded in our research into the early history
of a person fated to pervert no ordinary powers into no commonplace
guilt.

The charm is concluded, the circle closed round; the self-guided seeker
after knowledge has gained the fiend for the familiar.




CHAPTER X.

THE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN FATHER AND SON.

We pass over an interval of some months.

A painter stood at work at the easel, his human model before him. He was
employed on a nymph,--the Nymph Galatea. The subject had been taken
before by Salvator, whose genius found all its elements in the wild
rocks, gnarled, fantastic trees, and gushing waterfalls of the landscape;
in the huge ugliness of Polyphemus the lover; in the grace and suavity
and unconscious abandonment of the nymph, sleeking her tresses dripping
from the bath. The painter, on a larger canvas (for Salvator's picture,
at least the one we have seen, is among the small sketches of the great