Humorous stories; Mistaken identity -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The earl said to himself, “This spectre can eat apples, apparently. We
shall find out, now, if that is a specialty. I think, myself, it’s a
specialty. Apples, without doubt, constitute the spectral limit. It was
the case with our first parents. No, I am wrong—at least only partly
right. The line _was_ drawn at apples, just as in the present case, but
it was from the other direction.” The new clothes gave him a thrill of
pleasure and pride. He said to himself, “I’ve got part of him down to
date, anyway.”
Sellers said he was pleased with Tracy’s work; and he went on and
engaged him to restore his old masters, and said he should also want
him to paint his portrait and his wife’s and possibly his daughter’s.
The tide of the artist’s happiness was at flood, now. The chat flowed
pleasantly along while Tracy painted and Sellers carefully unpacked a
picture which he had brought with him. It was a chromo; a new one, just
out. It was the smirking, self-satisfied portrait of a man who was
inundating the Union with advertisements inviting everybody to buy his
specialty, which was a three-dollar shoe or a dress-suit or something
of that kind. The old gentleman rested the chromo flat upon his lap and
gazed down tenderly upon it, and became silent and meditative.
Presently Tracy noticed that he was dripping tears on it. This touched
the young fellow’s sympathetic nature, and at the same time gave him
the painful sense of being an intruder upon a sacred privacy, an
observer of emotions which a stranger ought not to witness. But his
pity rose superior to other considerations, and compelled him to try to
comfort the old mourner with kindly words and a show of friendly
interest. He said:
“I am very sorry—is it a friend whom—”
“Ah, more than that, far more than that—a relative, the dearest I had
on earth, although I was never permitted to see him. Yes, it is young
Lord Berkeley, who perished so heroically in the awful conflagration.
Why what is the matter?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing.”
“It was a little startling to be so suddenly brought face to face, so
to speak, with a person one has heard so much talk about. Is it a good
likeness?”
“Without doubt, yes. I never saw him, but you can easily see the
resemblance to his father,” said Sellers, holding up the chromo and
glancing from it to the chromo misrepresenting the Usurping Earl and
back again with an approving eye.
“Well, no—I am not sure that I make out the likeness. It is plain that
the Usurping Earl there has a great deal of character and a long face
like a horse’s, whereas his heir here is smirky, moon-faced and
characterless.”
“We are all that way in the beginning—all the line,” said Sellers,
undisturbed. “We all start as moonfaced fools, then later we tadpole
along into horse-faced marvels of intellect and character. It is by
that sign and by that fact that I detect the resemblance here and know
this portrait to be genuine and perfect. Yes, all our family are fools
at first.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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