"No, thank you, but I will trouble you for the vinegar," were her first words to him. There was nothing novel or suggestive in this, was there? Is there often anything novel or suggestive in the first greetings we exchange as we float upon the sea of life with those who hereafter will cause our wreck or share it? These two people, He and She, became great friends that summer. Her fresh, blithe nature was pleasant to him, although, it may be confessed, its manifestations were sometimes confusing. He was of rather elephantine temperament, as he was also heroic of stature and handsome. He was so unswift of speech and motion that she could dance around him a dozen times before he could say "Jack Robinson;" which, by the way, he never did say. She often got sadly in the way of his slow, conscientious sketching from Nature, but he did not complain, for she was pleasant, he thought, to look upon, even though his palette dried and the cloud-shadow on hill and sea floated miles away while he did so. It was not a sentimental relation that grew up between them. How could it be when everybody said there was "no sentiment in Ben Shaw, or even in his pictures"? They were never known to raise any clamor concerning their "kinship of souls" and all the usual sentimental etcetera. They liked each other, and took "solid comfort" in the companionship that made that summer's sketching so much pleasanter than had sketching ever been for either of them before. That was all. It was not very long before he very naturally took the place of teacher and she of pupil, for it was an open secret that she aspired to higher art than still life, while he, although not six months her senior, had been longer a student than she. Simpletons that they both were, they grappled audaciously with the purple, gold-filtered, ever-elusive and brooding mystery of the distant hills, and struggled with the infinite suggestiveness of the great, awful sea. They came home every night from both grapple and struggle with canvases as expressive of the mighty influences they had labored with as a child's fairy-tale hints at the divine splendor of mystery of the book of Revelation, and sat down to their supper of cold beef and doughnuts believing they feasted on ambrosia and nectar, and lived as divinely as were those not Massachusetts but Thessalian hills. How insolent is youth, and how foolish, to us who have outlived it! Unsymmetrical as this friendship was--that is, so dwarfed on the sentimental side--there was one of those two silly mortals who thus fooled themselves with the fancy that this was Olympus and their green apple-sauce honey of Hymettus who would not have changed places with the divinest divinity of all the immortal host.