"I had almost given up art," said Logan; "I had almost given it up as hopeless. How can there be art in a despiritualized country like this, that lets all its traditions rot away? I was just on the point of tossing up whether I should go on the stage or take to spouting at the street corners; for when a country is in such a condition that its artists are stifled, then it is ripe for revolution. I am instinctive, you know, like Napoleon. I feel that we are on the threshold of something big, and that I am to have my share in it. I used to think it would happen in art, but I despaired of that. It seemed to me that art in this country could go doddering on for generations, and then I thought it needed a political upheaval to push it into its grave. But when I saw your work, I said to myself: Here is the real thing, alive, personal, profound, skilled. I began to hope again. And now that I have met you I feel more hopeful still, and, let me tell you, like most painters, I don't find it easy to like another man's work." Mendel was fired. Trembling in every limb, he said:-- "It has been the dream of my life to find a friend who would work with me, think with me, go with me, share with me, not quarrelling with me because I am not this, that, and the other, but accepting me as I am--a man who has no country, no home, no love but art." "That," said Logan, with a portentous scowl and a downward jab of his thumb, "is what I have been looking for--some one, like yourself, who was absolutely sincere, absolutely single-minded and resolute. The spirit of art has brought us together. We will serve it together." They shook hands like young men on the stage, and Logan fetched a deep sigh of relief. Mitchell woke up, saying:-- "Gawd! I've been asleep. Have you two been talking? Gawd! It's two o'clock." "I'll walk home with you," said Logan. "We can keep to the river nearly the whole way by going from side to side." So they walked while the tide came up, sucking and lapping, while the red dragons' eyes of the barges came swinging up on it, moving up and down in a slow, irregular rhythm. It was very cold and the sky was thickly powdered with stars, whose pin-prick lights were reflected in the smooth water. Upon the dome of the young artist's vision that had before been black with infinite space, stars shone with a tender light. He was in ecstasy, and seemed to be skimming above the ground, hardly touching it with his feet. This long walk was like an exquisite dance, while Logan's rollings were like a pipe. . . . Often he sank into a dream that he was upon a grassy hill in a mountainy place, he and his friend, who played upon a pipe so mournfully yet gaily while he danced, and from the trees fell silvery dewdrops and the songs of birds, which turned into pennies as they reached the ground and rolled away down the hill.