A most interesting symbol of exquisite neatness, unbounded patience, and blind groping for artistic expression was Rhoda Baker’s “Leather-Works.” Rhoda Baker lived in a small Rhode Island village, which was dull at its birth and slow of growth and progress. She had a nature so timid, so repelling, and so wholly introspective, that, after nearly fifty years of shy and even unwilling “keeping company” with a preaching elder of the time,--a saint, almost a mystic,--she died without ever having given to the quaint, thin, pleasant-faced, awkward man, one word of encouragement to his equally timid, his hinting and halting love-making. During those patient years of warm hopes, but most scanty fruition, he had built a house on an island which he owned in Narragansett Bay, with a window where his beloved Rhoda could sit sewing when she became his wife, and watch him happily rowing across the Bay to her; but great lilac bushes grew up unchecked, and shaded and finally hid the window at which Rhoda never sat to welcome her husband-lover. After her death the Elder so grieved that he had naught to remind him and speak to him of his beloved, that he boldly decided to name his boat for her; but as he could not conscientiously say she had ever encouraged him by word or look in his incipient love-making, and he must be strictly honest and chivalrously respectful to her memory, he painted upon the boat in black letters this truthful yet dimly consoling legend, “Rhoda Wouldnt.” Poor Elder! Many a time had he ventured a-courting, and slowly entering, after his unanswered assault upon the door-knocker, had found the kitchen of this elusive Rhoda vacant,--_but her rocking-chair was slowly rocking_,--so he sadly left the deserted room, the unwelcoming house. He sacrificed his life to his affection for his dead love. He had all his days a fear, a premonition, that he should lose his life through a horse, so he never rode or drove, but walked, rowed, or sailed, and lived on an island to escape his dreaded doom. When Rhoda’s brother died in a distant town, the Elder was bidden to the funeral, and he honored his Rhoda’s memory by his attendance, and he had to ride there. As he left the house of mourning, a fractious young colt ran away with him, threw him out of the wagon, and broke his neck.