“Yes,” said Barker; but having answered Sewell's personal question, he seemed to feel himself in no wise concerned with the general inquiry which Sewell had made, and he let it lie where Sewell had let it drop. But the minister was so well pleased with the fact that Barker had understood anything of what he had said, that he was content to let the notion he had thrown out take its chance of future effect, and rising, said briskly: “Come upstairs with me into my study, and I will show you a picture of Agassiz. It's a very good photograph.” He led the way out of the reception-room, and tripped lightly in his slippered feet up the steps against which Barker knocked the toes of his clumsy boots. He was not large, nor naturally loutish, but the heaviness of the country was in every touch and movement. He dropped the photograph twice in his endeavour to hold it between his stiff thumb and finger. Sewell picked it up each time for him, and restored it to his faltering hold. When he had securely lodged it there, he asked sweetly: “Did you ever hear what Agassiz said when a scheme was once proposed to him by which he could make a great deal of money?” “I don't know as I did,” replied Barker. “'But, gentlemen, _I've no time to make money_.'” Barker received the anecdote in absolute silence, standing helplessly with the photograph in his hand; and Sewell with a hasty sigh forbore to make the application to the ordinary American ambition to be rich that he had intended. “That's a photograph of the singer Nilsson,” he said, cataloguing the other objects on the chimney-piece. “She was a peasant, you know, a country girl in Norway. That's Grévy, the President of the French Republic; his father was a peasant. Lincoln, of course. Sforza, throwing his hoe into the oak,” he said, explaining the picture that had caught Barker's eye on the wall above the mantel. “He was working in the field, when a band of adventurers came by, and he tossed his hoe at the tree. If it fell to the ground, he would keep on hoeing; if it caught in the branches and hung there, he would follow the adventurers. It caught, and he went with the soldiers and became Duke of Milan. I like to keep the pictures of these great Originals about me,” said Sewell, “because in our time, when we refer so constantly to law, we are apt to forget that God is creative as well as operative.” He used these phrases involuntarily; they slipped from his tongue because he was in the habit of saying this about these pictures, and he made no effort to adapt them to Barker's comprehension, because he could not see that the idea would be of any use to him. He went on pointing out the different objects in the quiet room, and he took down several books from the shelves that covered the whole wall, and showed them to Barker, who, however, made no effort to look at them for himself, and did not say anything about them. He did what Sewell bade him do in admiring this thing or that; but if