The floor consisted merely of bare boards, although at one end, in front of the fireplace, there was an oasis of carpet, on which rested a table for pipes and tobacco, together with two comfortable arm-chairs. Scattered here and there were statues finished and unfinished, some completed in marble, others incomplete in clay. Maurice had gratified his artistic desires for the perfection of sculpture by surrounding himself with copies in marble of some famous statues, for now, as he was wealthy, he could afford to do so. Here danced the Faun with his grotesque visage and lissome pose; there smiled Hebe, holding her cup for the banquet of the gods; Bacchus with his crown of vine-leaves gazed serenely on the sad face of the draped Ariadne in the distance; Apollo watched the lizard crawling up the tree-trunk; and Hermes, with winged feet, poised himself on his pedestal as if for flight. The whole studio was filled with the fair and gracious forms of Greek art, and no wonder at times Maurice despaired of producing anything worth looking at beside these immortal productions of the Hellenic brain and hands. The great necessity now is, not to know what one can do, but what one cannot do; and if these complacent artists, poets, sculptors, novelists, only abode by this rule, the world would be spared the perpetration of many an atrocity in marble, verse, or on canvas, which the conceited creators think perfection. Maurice Roylands had a pretty taste for chipping marble, but he was by no means a genius, and his statues, while perfectly wrought in accordance with the canons of art, yet lacked that soul which only the true sculptor can give to his creations. It was a fortunate thing for him that he was a rich man, for assuredly he would never have become a great sculptor. His ideas were excellent, but he could not carry them out in accordance with the figment of his brain, as he lacked the divine spark of genius which alone can fully accomplish what it conceives. At present, clad in a blouse, he was standing in front of a mass of wet clay, manipulating the soft material with dexterous fingers into a semblance of the fanciful Endymion of his brain and the real Endymion of Caliphronas. That gentleman was posed on the model’s platform in the distance, and was beguiling the time by incessant chattering of this, that, and the other thing. The artist had based his conception of this statue of Endymion on these lines of Keats, poet laureate to Dian herself,— “What is there in the Moon that thou shouldst move My heart so potently?”