The victorious painter has been weeks over these same trees that have baffled him; he has painted them on gray days and sunny days; in the morning, at noon, and in the gloaming. He has loved their texture and the thousand little lights and darks; the sparkle of the black, green, or gray moss, and the delicate tones that played up and down their stalwart trunks. He has toiled in the heat of the day, his nerves on edge, and sometimes great drops of sweat on his troubled forehead. Now and then he has sprung from his seat for a farther-away look at his sketch. With a sigh and a heart bowed down (oh, how desolate are these hours!) he has noted how wooden and commonplace and mean and despicable his work was--what an insult he has cast upon the beautiful yellow birch, this outdoor, motionless, old model that has stood so patiently before him, posing all day without moving; its big arms above its head its leaves and branches stock-still to make it all the easier for him. Suddenly in all this depression, an inspiration has entered his dull brain--he will use burnt umber in stead of Vandyke brown for the bark! or light chrome and indigo instead of yellow ochre and black for the green! Presto! Ah, that's like it! Another pat, and another, and still one more! How quickly now the canvas loses its pasty mediocrity. How soon the paint and the brush-marks and the niggly little touches fade away and the THING ITSELF comes out and says "How do you do?" and that it is so glad to see him, and that it has been lurking behind these colors all day, trying to make his acquaintance, and he would have none of it. What good friends he and the sketch have become now; how proud he is of it, and of possessing it and of CREATING it! Then little quivery-quavers go creeping up and down his spine and away out to his fingertips; and he KNOWS that he has something really GOOD. He carries it home in his hand, oh, so carefully (he strapped its predecessor on his back yesterday without caring), and a dozen times he stops to look at its dear face, propping it against a stump for a better light, just to see if he had not been mistaken after all. He can hardly wait until it is dark enough to see how it looks by gas-light, or candle-light, or kerosene, or whatever else he may have in his quarters. Years after, the dear old thing is still hanging on his studio wall. He has never sold it nor given it away. He could not--it was too valuable, too constantly giving him good advice and showing him what the thing WAS. Not what he thought it was, or hoped it was, or would like it to be, but what it WAS.