A painter must be content with the work his patrons set him to do and not indulge his own caprices. Well, well, admitting the range of the painter's art to have been cramped and limited, has any age or country the power to cramp the genius of an artist? Is high art only to be found in imaginative pictures? Does not a portrait become high art under a master hand? Can that be called a mechanical art that gives intellect or sentiment to the eye, firmness or softness to the lip, the natural bloom to the cheek, truth and beauty to the whole? Few, let us hope, even in this matter of fact age, but would rank the real artist before the photographic artisan who usurps his name. If, in the present age, now that we are accustomed to a much more rapid process of reproducing the human face, there are to be found those who honour the true artist, imagine how his art must have been held in honour when it was the only way of immortalising men! It need not be wondered at that among those classes where the appearance of a painter was less common, that the respect he inspired almost amounted to awe in certain instances. This was the case with our Helen, who never having set eyes before on a real artist, looked with awe and wonder on our painter as a species of magician who possessed an art not merely unknown in her humble sphere, but which she was sure that the worthy members of the club were alike ignorant of, however learned they might be in other respects. The painter's youth and good looks, together with his possessing this mysterious art at such an early age, elevated him at once into a hero in her eyes. Then there was the strange fact of his having seen and spoken to a ghost in the same house where she herself had been born and bred, the very ghost she had been frightened so often with in her childhood, but which was, nevertheless, so chary of its appearance that it had found no one for upwards of half a century worthy of revealing itself to until now, and had chosen for that purpose the young artist before her, and that, too, the very first night that he arrived at the Inn. What was there peculiar in the organisation of our painter, that he should have been selected before all others to gaze on the august presence of one risen from the dead? The haunted chamber had been repeatedly slept in by all the members of the club in turn, and by many strangers beside, for years back, and yet never before within the experience of our host had the headless lady vouchsafed a parley with any one of them. The preference, therefore, shewn towards our friend McGuilp by the tenant of the haunted chamber had raised him at once in the esteem of the whole club, and the marked respect with which he was treated by the other guests, all of them older men than himself, did not fail to escape the quick eye of Helen, who felt inwardly flattered that the man for whom she had conceived so warm a sympathy, should be so honoured among his better fellows.