One night, they sat in the cafe of an old French hostelry where, in the polyglot chatter of three languages, one hears much shop talk of art and literature. Between the mirrored walls, Samson was for the first time glimpsing the shallow sparkle of Bohemia. The orchestra was playing an appealing waltz. Among the diners were women gowned as he had never seen women gowned before. They sat with men, and met the challenge of ardent glances with dreamy eyes. They hummed an accompaniment to the air, and sometimes loudly and publicly quarreled. But Samson looked on as taciturn and unmoved as though he had never dined elsewhere. And yet, his eyes were busy, for suddenly he laid down his knife, and picked up his fork. "Hit 'pears like I've got a passel of things ter l'arn," he said, earnestly. "I reckon I mout as well begin by l'arnin' how ter eat." He had heretofore regarded a fork only as a skewer with which to hold meat in the cutting. Lescott laughed. "Most rules of social usage," he explained, "go back to the test of efficiency. It is considered good form to eat with the fork, principally because it is more efficient," The boy nodded. "All right," he acquiesced. "You l'arn me all them things, an' I'll be obleeged ter ye. Things is diff'rent in diff'rent places. I reckon the Souths hes a right ter behave es good es anybody." When a man, whose youth and courage are at their zenith, and whose brain is tuned to concert pitch, is thrown neck and crop out of squalid isolation into the melting pot of Manhattan, puzzling problems of readjustment must follow. Samson's half-starved mind was reaching out squid-like tentacles in every direction. He was saying little, seeing much, not yet coordinating or tabulating, but grimly bolting every morsel of enlightenment. Later, he would digest; now, he only gorged. Before he could hope to benefit by the advanced instruction of the life -classes, he must toil and sweat over the primer stages of drawing. Several months were spent laboring with charcoal and paper over plaster casts in Lescott's studio, and Lescott himself played instructor. When the skylight darkened with the coming of evening, the boy whose mountain nature cried out for exercise went for long tramps that carried him over many miles of city pavements, and after that, when the gas was lit, he turned, still insatiably hungry, to volumes of history, and algebra, and facts. So gluttonous was his protégé's application that the painter felt called on to remonstrate against the danger of overwork. But Samson only laughed; that was one of the things he had learned to do since he left the mountains. "I reckon," he drawled, "that as long as I'm at work, I kin keep out of trouble. Seems like that's the only way I kin do it." * * * * *