Sewell had never thought his wife's reception-room very splendidly appointed, but Barker must have been oppressed by it, for he sat in absolute silence after resuming his chair, and made no sign of intending to open the matter upon which he came. In the kindness of his heart Sewell could not refrain from helping him on. “When did you come to Boston?” he asked with a cheeriness which he was far from feeling. “This morning,” said Barker briefly, but without the tremor in his voice which Sewell expected. “You've never been here before, I suppose,” suggested Sewell, with the vague intention of generalising or particularising the conversation, as the case might be. Barker abruptly rejected the overture, whatever it was. “I don't know as you got a letter from me a spell back,” he said. “Yes, I did,” confessed Sewell. “I did receive that letter,” he repeated, “and I ought to have answered it long ago. But the fact is--” He corrected himself when it came to his saying this, and said, “I mean that I put it by, intending to answer it when I could do so in the proper way, until, I'm very sorry to say, I forgot it altogether. Yes, I forgot it, and I certainly ask your pardon for my neglect. But I can't say that as it's turned out I altogether regret it. I can talk with you a great deal better than I could write to you in regard to your”--Sewell hesitated between the words poems and verses, and finally said--“work. I have blamed myself a great deal,” he continued, wincing under the hurt which he felt that he must be inflicting on the young man as well as himself, “for not being more frank with you when I saw you at home in September. I hope your mother is well?” “She's middling,” said Barker, “but my married sister that came to live with us since you was there has had a good deal of sickness in her family. Her husband's laid up with the rheumatism most of the time.” “Oh!” murmured Sewell sympathetically. “Well! I ought to have told you at that time that I could not see much hope of your doing acceptable work in a literary way; and if I had supposed that you ever expected to exercise your faculty of versifying to any serious purpose,--for anything but your own pleasure and entertainment,--I should certainly have done so. And I tell you now that the specimens of the long poem you have sent me give me even less reason to encourage you than the things you read me at home.” Sewell expected the audible crash of Barker's air-castles to break the silence which the young man suffered to follow upon these words; but nothing of the kind happened, and for all that he could see, Barker remained wholly unaffected by what he had said. It nettled Sewell a little to see him apparently so besotted in his own conceit, and he added: “But I think I had better not ask you to rely altogether upon my opinion in the matter, and I will go with you to a publisher, and you can get a professional judgment. Excuse me a moment.”