There was something in the pair that reminded me of Parrhasius and the Captive; and being in somewhat of a sketching mood myself at the time, I produced my book and pencil, and leaning over the fence, sketched the painter and his howling model. [Illustration: SO SICK!] On my way back to the city the bay seemed even rougher than in the morning. There was hardly a passenger on board the ferry-boat but showed symptoms of trouble. Although most of them would have been excellent subjects for the artist of a comic pictorial, my attention was specially directed towards an elderly lady who sat with folded arms, the elbows resting upon her knees, and a most woe-begone expression upon her wrinkled visage. Some passengers who were sick were able partly to conceal their emotions; _she_ was not; every muscle of her face betrayed her. She was sick and couldn’t help but show it. [Illustration: AT THE RAIL.] If any individual amongst that crowd of disquieted passengers knocked louder at the door of human sympathy than did the old lady referred to, it was unmistakably that woman who was sick and had to show it at the vessel’s rail. CHRISTMAS EVE. Christmas Eve! I sit idly by my window, listening to the rapid patter of the rain upon the shingles and the wild whistle of the wind as it plays around the gables, or draws weird music from the telegraph wires stretched between the house tops, and upon which dangles the ghost of many a schoolboy’s kite. Christmas Eve! and I am not yet invited out to dinner! what can this mean? Am I then left to wither for want of attention, like some poor shrub plucked from a garden and planted in a graveyard? Well, let it be so. Alone though I am, I nevertheless enjoy myself hugely, and it requires considerable to enliven me now. There was a time when I could be moved to mirth by very little. The desperate efforts of a one-legged grasshopper describing circles while endeavoring to leap straight ahead, would amuse me for hours together. But it is not so now; I turn from such scenes to bury my eyes in the pages of profound works, and it is meet and proper I should. For the last half hour I have been watching an old washerwoman stealing, as I think, a neighbor’s wood. It is barely possible that she is taking this method of paying herself for services rendered at the tub. Be this as it may, the wood is going. There is no mistake about that. It is interesting to me, as it furnishes food for comment, and keeps the mind from lagging too long around the saddening fact that Time is writing lines upon my brow “with his antique pen.” Besides it is holiday season, and though I am not able to be charitable to a great degree, I can at least afford to be indifferent in this case.