lay out of the track of coach-road or railway, and had made no more progress within the last forty years than if the inhabitants had been so many Rip Van Winkles. The maiden lady was Philip Foley's aunt, and the only near relation he possessed. That she loved him to distraction was the most natural thing in the world, for she was a gentle and loving creature, and for the last five-and-twenty years of her life had concentrated her affection upon the orphan boy who had come from India a frail nursling to be committed to her charge by his sickly father, who went back to Bengal to die, within the year of his return, on a dismal march through a cholera-haunted district. Whence the child derived his love of art, no one knew. His father had been an ensign in the Company's service; his mother, a frivolous young person, with thirteen hundred pounds in Indian Stock, a tendency to consumption, and not two ideas of her own. But the divine afflatus that gives life to the nostrils of painters and poets is no hereditary possession to be handed from father to son, like so many acres of common earth, or so much money in Consols. From the hour in which Philip Foley's baby fingers first tightened round a pencil, he was an artist. He drew houses, and apple-trees, and straggling reptiles which he meant for horses, before he could speak; and then when he was old enough to buy his first colour-box, he went out into the woods and fields, like Constable; and alone, amongst the beautiful mysteries of nature, his soul and mind expanded, unfettered and untaught. The time came, as it almost always does come, sooner or later, in the lives of gifted creatures, when the appreciative stranger came across the boy's pathway. An elderly gentleman came suddenly upon young Philip one day, as he sat on a fallen tree in a clearing, painting the glade that stretched before him, darkly mysterious in its sombre shadows. The elderly gentleman asked the boy more questions than he had ever been asked consecutively in his life before; and as it generally happens to a lad who is tolerably well connected, it happened in this case. The elderly gentleman had known a member of Philip's family, and was inclined to be interested in him on that account. "But a great deal more so on account of those purple shadows," said the stranger pleasantly. "One may meet young sprigs of old families any day in the year; but a lad of fourteen who has such nice ideas about light and shade is by no means a common person. And your aunt is using all her interest to get you to Addiscombe, is she? so that you may follow in your father's footsteps, and die of cholera at sunrise, to be buried in the sands before sunset. Let your aunt use her interest to get you into Mr. O'Skuro's academy, and she'll be employing it for some purpose. Your mother had some money, hadn't she?"