These expressions Miss Falconer uttered with much vivacity, and began the question which she ceased so abruptly, in a voice of eagerness. Indeed, she felt that she had been almost thrown off her guard; and she therefore, without any purpose, except to divert the attention of those present to another subject, and certainly with no definite object in view, said, laying her finger at the same time on the sketch, "I do not well understand this tree, sir. What kind do you call it?" "Oh," said Hunter, with a smile, "that is a palm." "A _palm_!" cried Miss Falconer, eyeing him with surprise; "and pray, sir, how came a palm on the hills of the Brandywine?" The question threw the painter into confusion, which was increased by the keen and searching glances of the critic, over whom this third violation of propriety seemed to produce as strong an effect as the detection of it did on the unlucky artist. "A palm! good heavens," he stammered, with a laugh; "and I did not myself discover the incongruity before? Ah, Miss Falconer, you are the very princess of censors; and I am glad you saw the fault, before it might have been too late to remedy it. But 'use doth breed a habit in a man,' as the great poet says; and painters are only flesh and blood, after all. This comes of taking my first lessons in painting, among the lagoons of Carolina. I must look close: I warrant me, I have stuck a live-oak into the picture also." "Really, sir," said Miss Falconer, whom the opportunity of playing the critic seemed to have put into a better humour, "I must beg pardon for my ignorance. I thought that in Carolina we had no palms, except cabbage-trees; and this has a marvellous soaring, long-leaved, cocoa-nut appearance, judging from the prints I have seen of that tree, for of the tree itself I am quite ignorant." "You are right, madam," said the painter; "the cocoa-nut is, in every way, a much finer palm than the cabbage-tree; and for that reason, I have always been accustomed to take a painter's license with the latter, to make it as graceful and stately as possible. Painting, you know, is a sort of palpable poetry; and one must not be tied down too closely to nature." "The cocoa-nut has an immensely long leaf, has it not?" demanded Miss Falconer. "Full fifteen feet," said the painter, warming into enthusiasm; "and each one so much shaped like a great waving feather, that you might deem it a plume plucked from the wing of Lucifer, or some other colossus of demons. One can never forget its majestic appearance, who has once looked upon the tree." "You have been, then, in the Islands?" "Certainly, madam, yes;--that is to say, in my early youth, when the tree made a great impression on my mind. You may judge, therefore, how natural it is that I should amend our inferior palms by adding somewhat of the beauty of those that belong to the tropics."