A gentle-voiced, earnest, whole-souled old man--the one only instructor--presided over this temple of art. He had devoted his whole life to the sowing of figs and the reaping of thistles, and in his old age was just beginning to see the shoots of a new art forcing their way through the quickening clay of American civilization. Once in awhile, as assistants in this almost hopeless task, there would stray into his class-room some of the painters who, unconsciously, were founding a national art and in honor of whom a grateful nation will one day search the world over for marble white enough on which to perpetuate their memories: men as distinct in their aims, methods, and results as was that other group of unknown and despised immortals starving together at that very time in a French village across the sea--and men, too, equally deserving of the esteem and gratitude of their countrymen. Oliver knew the names of these distinguished visitors to the Academy, as did all the other members of the Skylarks, and he knew their work. The pictures of George Inness, Sanford Gifford, Kensett, McEntee, Hart, Eastman Johnson, Hubbard, Church, Casilaer, Whittredge, and the others had been frequently discussed around the piano on the top floor at Miss Teetum's, and their merits and supposed demerits often hotly contested. He had met Kensett once at the house of Mr. Slade, and McEntee had been pointed out to him as he left the theatre one night, but few of the others had ever crossed his path. Of the group Gifford appealed to him most. One golden "Venice" of the painter, which hung in a picture-store, always delighted him--a stretch of the Lagoon with a cluster of butterfly sails and a far-away line of palaces, towers, and domes lying like a string of pearls on the horizon. There was another of Kensett's, a point of rocks thrust out like a mailed hand into a blue sea; and a McEntee of October woods, all brown and gold; but the Gifford he had never forgotten; nor will anyone else who has seen it. No wonder then that all his life he remembered that particular night, when a slender, dark-haired man in loose gray clothes sauntered into the class-room and moved around among the easels, giving a suggestion here and a word of praise there, for that was the night on which Professor Cummings touched our young hero's shoulder and said: "Mr. Gifford likes your drawing very much, Mr. Horn"--a word of praise which, as he wrote to Crocker, steadied his uncertain fingers "as nothing else had ever done."