“It is a poor thing,” answered the magician, “not worthy of your attention; but if you will vouchsafe me a sip of the wine, I have been cracking these dry nuts so long. Ah, I do begin to be weary!” The girl peeped into the show box. “All very pretty, but rather stiff and monotonous,” she said. “Not so good as you can paint, Gaspar. Come, let us go home.” She made the gray man a pleasant little courtesy, took her vase of wine, and she and Gaspar went back to the village to paint their own pictures, leaving the little magician to crack his nuts and look into his show box as long as he pleased. THE VIOLET FLAME Rosamond was the child of a village blacksmith, and of a lady said by the villagers to be a princess from a far land. She herself claimed to be descended from an Ocean Queen; but no one believed that, except her little girl, who thought her mother must know best. Rosamond would sit by her for hours, gazing into the river that flowed through their garden, and listening to her mothers stories of golden palaces beneath the water. But she also liked to pry about her father's forge, and wonder at the quick sparks and great roaring fires. Her cousin Alfred would stay there with her, but while she was watching the red glow of the fire and the heavy fall of her father's hammer, he was gazing upon the violet flame that flickered above her forehead. One day, when she was playing with him in the picture gallery of the old castle, in which his mother was housekeeper, she called him to look at the portrait of a child daintily holding a bird on the tip of her finger, and arrayed in the quaint richness of the old-fashioned costume. “She looks like you,” her cousin said, “only she has not a little trembling flame upon her forehead.” “Have I a flame upon my forehead?” asked Rosamond, wondering. “Come and look,” answered Alfred, and he led her to a great mirror, where she for the first time saw the violet flame. “How beautiful it is!” she exclaimed. “O, but it is growing dim; you must not look at it,” said Alfred. “Come and let us run up and down the garden, between the great hedges.” But Rosamond, having once seen the violet flame, could not be satisfied until she had been to the castle to take another look, and found so much pleasure in gazing at herself in the great mirror, that she went every day to pay herself a stolen visit, while Alfred was at school. But one day he found her there, and said, “I see how it is that the pretty flame has gone; you have been admiring it too much by yourself. I shall not love you now.”