Not without cause was the evening smile of sunlight reflected on Master Swift’s lips. Between the fingers of a hand lying on his lap lay Jan’s letter to announce that he and the artist were coming to the cottage, and in intervals of reading and re-reading it the schoolmaster spouted poetry, and Rufus wagged a sedately sympathetic tail. “How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are Thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.” And, waving his hand after the old manner towards the glowing water-meadows, he went on with increasing emphasis:— “Who would have thought my shrivelled heart Could have recovered greennesse?” Perhaps Rufus felt himself bound to answer what had a tone of appeal in it, or perhaps some strange sympathy, not with Master Swift, began already to disturb him. He rose and knocked up the hand in which the letter lay with his long nose, and wandered restlessly about, and then settled down again with his eyes towards the garden-gate. The old man sat still. The evening breeze stirred his white hair, and he drank in the scents drawn freshly from field and flowers after the rain, and they were like balm to him. As he sat up, his voice seemed to recover its old power, and he clasped his hands together over Jan’s letter, and went on:— “And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing: O my only Light! It cannot be That I am he On whom Thy tempests fell all night!” So far Mr. George Herbert; but the poem was never finished, for Rufus jumped up with a cry, and after standing for a moment with stiffened limbs, and muffled whines, as if he could not believe his own glaring yellow eyes, he burst away with tenfold impetus, and dragged, and tore, and pulled, and all but carried Jan to the schoolmaster’s feet. And the painter walked away down the garden, and stood looking long over the water-meadows. CHAPTER XXXVIII. A PAINTER’S EDUCATION.—MASTER CHUTER’S PORT.—A FAREWELL FEAST.—THE SLEEP OF THE JUST. “I HOPE, Jan,” said Master Swift, “that the gentleman will overlook my want of respect towards himself, in consideration of what it was to me to see your face again.” “Don’t distress me by speaking of it, Mr. Swift,” said the painter, taking his hand, and sitting down beside him in the porch. As he returned the artist’s friendly grasp, the schoolmaster scanned his face with some of the old sharpness. “Sir,” said he, “I beg you to forgive my freedom. I’m a rough man with a rough tongue, which I could never teach to speak the feelings of my heart; but I humbly thank you, sir, for your goodness to this boy.”