"Chaff away, dear old Hans!" cried the young man, joyously. "Now I'll stake my head that I will become a famous artist just to have the laugh on you! I will work from morning till night with a true malicious pleasure, grinding and fretting till the dilettante skin is rubbed off and something better appears below it. And you shall see that I have not spent these seven years altogether in lounging. If you will run through my sketch-books from both continents--but _apropos_, what have you been doing in the mean while? Is it not a shame that I haven't been able to keep track of your progress toward immortality, even by a wretched photograph? And here I have been running on for an hour over my own adventures, while the most glorious wonders of the world are waiting for me over yonder!" He strode quickly across the yard, to which they had come back while they were talking, and entered the house. "You will repent this haste, rash boy!" Jansen called after him, while an odd smile played about his lips. "You will indeed wonder over much that you see--but the wonders of the world that you dream of--they are still in this narrow room" (he pointed to his forehead), "and even there they are not always in the best light!" With these words he unlocked one of the two lower doors, and let Felix pass in. It was a second studio, adjoining that in which he had worked during the morning; a room precisely like the other, its walls painted in the same stone-color, and its great square window half draped in the same fashion. And yet no one would have believed that the same spirit ruled here that had created the dancing Bacchante in the next atelier. On slender pedestals stood a multitude of figures, most of them of half life-size, such as are used for the decoration of Catholic churches, chapels and cemeteries. Some of them were just begun, some were almost finished works; and in all could be clearly recognized the hands of the pupils who had their execution in charge--sometimes more and sometimes less skillfully imitating the little original models, barely six inches high, that stood on small shelves beside the copies. While the latter were neatly cut in sandstone or in the cheaper marbles--and a few in wood, decorated with all manner of painting and gilding--the little models were in plaster, and spotted and nicked by constant use. Yet these doll-like little madonnas, saints and apostles, and praying and playing angels in their heavy draperies, had a certain odd and now and then almost caricatured life-likeness--so great that not all of its charm was lost, even in the dry copies made by the assistants. They had something of the same element of humor that Ariosto gives to his personages--which by no means lose in life or force because their author has lost his own simple faith in them.