“‘The picture does not need me any more, and I am very glad, for my head aches sadly—they say the portrait is very like me, mother.’ “I resolved to go with her to see it on the following day, but—oh, Father in Heaven! when the time came that I looked upon it first, my child lay here. I cannot tell you how she faded in my arms day by day—but, when I had seen her own rose-tree planted over the place of her rest, and had wept upon the green sod till the fountain of tears seemed dry, slowly and wearily I sought the studio of the painter, longing, yet almost fearing, to look upon her image there. Oh, what a vision met my gaze! I had thought to see her semblance—to trace a likeness to my loved Elise in the artist’s work; but there, full of life and beauty as though she had never left me, she stood before me. I wept over that picture tears more passionate than I had shed beside her grave, and I begged and received permission to visit it every day. “A few nights after, on returning to my home, I found that my aged father, who had long been yearning to return to the land of his youth, had been making some arrangements with friends who were in a few months to sail for Italy, feeling that I would not refuse to go with him, now that my only tie to America, to _life_, save him, was severed. A week before I would have said yes—would have left the dear grave of my buried Elise, and gone with my father to die in the land of our birth; but now I seemed held by a living tie—I felt as if my child were with me here, and I must take her, or my heart would break. I told my father and his friends this; we were all poor, but they loved me, and by the sale of many little articles—some _how dear_, God only knows, we raised money enough to buy the picture, at the price which I had often heard from Elise the artist demanded for a portrait. “I could not have believed my stricken heart capable of the joy that throbbed through all its pulses, as I entered the painter’s room with my treasure-laden purse in my hand. I know my voice faltered—but oh, Heaven! how it died within me when I heard a firm denial of my request! Tears and pleadings—all a mother’s agony availed not; for some purpose of his own, some artists’ exhibition—what, I could not wholly comprehend—he would have the picture for his own—he would not yield it up, but coldly and calmly persisted in his refusal. Day after day I have been to him, but in vain. The time of our departure is drawing near, and I know that duty to my father demands that I leave him not to go down the way of life alone. I must go—I must leave my child, that blessed, pictured face forever!” The woman’s frame trembled violently, and passionately exclaiming—“Oh, Loring, Edgar Loring!” she laid her face upon the grave and wept convulsively.