“Why, it stands to reason,” said the Model. “Work another week at my legs, and it’ll be the same thing. You’ll make ’em out as knotty and as knobby, at last, as if they was the trunks of two old trees. Then, take and stick my legs and throat on to another man’s body, and you’ll make a reg’lar monster. And that’s the way the public gets their reg’lar monsters, every first Monday in May, when the Royal Academy Exhibition opens.” “You are a critic,” said I, with an air of deference. “I’m in an uncommon ill humour, if that’s it,” rejoined the Model, with great indignation. “As if it warn’t bad enough for a bob a-hour, for a man to be mixing himself up with that there jolly old furniter that one ‘ud think the public know’d the wery nails in by this time—or to be putting on greasy old ats and cloaks, and playing tambourines in the Bay o’ Naples, with Wesuvius a smokin’ according to pattern in the background, and the wines a bearing wonderful in the middle distance—or to be unpolitely kicking up his legs among a lot o’ gals, with no reason whatever in his mind, but to show ’em—as if this warn’t bad enough, I’m to go and be thrown out of employment too!” “Surely no!” said I. “Surely yes,” said the indignant Model. “BUT I’LL GROW ONE.” The gloomy and threatening manner in which he muttered the last words, can never be effaced from my remembrance. My blood ran cold. I asked of myself, what was it that this desperate Being was resolved to grow? My breast made no response. I ventured to implore him to explain his meaning. With a scornful laugh, he uttered this dark prophecy: “I’LL GROW ONE. AND, MARK MY WORDS, IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!” We parted in the storm, after I had forced half-a-crown on his acceptance, with a trembling hand. I conclude that something supernatural happened to the steam-boat, as it bore his reeking figure down the river; but it never got into the papers. Two years elapsed, during which I followed my profession without any vicissitudes; never holding so much as a motion, of course. At the expiration of that period, I found myself making my way home to the Temple, one night, in precisely such another storm of thunder and lightning as that by which I had been overtaken on board the steam-boat—except that this storm, bursting over the town at midnight, was rendered much more awful by the darkness and the hour. As I turned into my court, I really thought a thunderbolt would fall, and plough the pavement up. Every brick and stone in the place seemed to have an echo of its own for the thunder. The water-spouts were overcharged, and the rain came tearing down from the house-tops as if they had been mountain-tops.