And were all these things going on while the artistic Jenny was busy on the porch? Possibly. Probably. But with such conjectures the author of this serious essay in art criticism has no concern. To return to the account of the picture--Jenny drew next the renowned Charles Francis Quigley. But now her pencil was dipped in a mild solution of venom--imparted to it, I fear, when she thoughtfully placed its point between her small lips. For those same lips had desired chocolates--and the chocolates had turned out to be nothing but poesy. Therefore she sacrificed realism to satire, and made Charlie (really a very nice fellow, whom she came to like very much in later years) something of a fop. She made the cut of his coat too extreme, his hair too curly, his mustache too obviously waxed. She deliberately gave his eye a sentimental expression; she smiled derisively as she padded his pictured sleeve. And then she gave her drawing its crowning charm--she put in the “selbst-portrait.” She drew the little cedar tree that flanked the porch, and she drew herself kneeling beside it--seeing, but not seen by, the rapt Esther and Charlie. Far from being ashamed of this act of sisterly espionage, she gloried in it, and brought all her art to the task of immortalising it. So in my book the locust tree is forever in leaf and two little birds poise always against the summer sky. And always Charlie, hat in hand, presents to the radiant Esther “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirke White.” And always the little artist, with long curls hanging over her white frock, laughs at the lovers from behind her cedar tree. The light was fading now, but Jenny had found another blank page--that preceding the section devoted to Kirke White’s verses. Supper wouldn’t be ready for fifteen minutes, so she started on a picture more difficult than the simple incident just drawn. She chose for her scene Riley’s Riding Academy, where she and Esther spent every Wednesday morning. There was Esther, seated with the sedateness appropriate to her eighteen years, upon the tamest of nags. And there was Jenny, in her fetching habit, perilously poised upon her wildly careering steed. With enthusiastic pencil did Jenny depict her own brave unconcern, and Esther’s timorousness. How firmly Esther clutches the reins of her mild beast, how startled is her face as she looks upon her daring and nonchalant younger sister!