and grandma to impress one with the reality of the fact that this still youthful-looking couple are not masquerading in the parts. Mr. Stedman, in spite of his grayish beard and mustache, is a singularly young-looking man for his years. He is slight, with slender figure and delicate features. His motions and gestures are full of impulse and energy. He has the bearing of a man who has measured his strength with the world. The delicate refinement and finish of his work, as well as its power and vigor, are foreshadowed in his _personnel_. His manner is an epitome of his literary style. His face has the charm which comes from high-bred features molded into the highest form of expression--that of intellectual energy infused with a deep and keen sympathetic quality. Something of this facial charm he inherits from his mother, now Mrs. Kinney. As the lovely and brilliant wife of the Hon. William B. Kinney, when the latter was American Minister at the Court of Turin, this gifted lady won a European reputation for the sparkling radiance of her beauty. As a talker Mr. Stedman possesses the first and highest of qualities--that of spontaneity. The thought leaps at a bound into expression. So rapid is the flow of ideas, and so fluent its delivery, that one thought sometimes trips on the heels of the next. His talk, in its range, its variety, and the multiplicity of subjects touched upon, even more, perhaps, than his work, is an unconscious betrayal of his many-sided life. The critic, the poet, the man of business and the man of the world, the lover of nature, and the keen observer of the social machinery of life, each by turn takes the ascendant. The whole, woven together by a brilliant tissue of short, epigrammatic, trenchant sentences, abounding in good things one longs to remember and quote, forms a most picturesque and dazzling ensemble. Added to the brilliancy, there is a genial glow of humor, and such an ardor and enthusiasm in his capacity for admiration, as complete Mr. Stedman’s equipment as a man and a conversationalist. He would not be a poet did he not see his fellow-man aureoled with a halo. His natural attitude toward life and men is an almost boyish belief and delight in their being admirable. It is only on discovering they are otherwise that the critic appears to soften the disappointment by the rigors of analysis. Stedman is by nature an enthusiast. He owes it to his training that he is a critic. As an enthusiast he has the fervor, the intensity, the exaltation, which belong to the believer and the lover of all things true and good and beautiful. He is as generous as he is ardent, and his gift of praising is not to be counted as among the least of his qualities. But the critic comes in to temper the ardor, to weigh the value, and to test the capacity. And thus it is found that there are two men in Mr. Stedman, one of whom appears to be perpetually in pursuit of the other, and never quite to overtake him.