About two years before the opening of our story he had returned to San Francisco, with a portfolio of sketches, a few hundred dollars, and a prodigious store of canvases, paints, and brushes. He was welcomed by the many friends who had followed his career with interest, and soon received more orders for portraits than he could well fill. His taste led him to prefer another branch of painting; and it was for the purpose of studying the very beautiful scenery in the neighborhood of San Rosario that he had established himself in the tower of the old Spanish Mission. He was also partly induced to take this step, because he found that home life, always irksome to him, had become, after his long emancipation from domestic rules and regulations, wellnigh intolerable. Graham’s character was a peculiar one, full of contradictory traits; it might be compared to a mass of white quartz, through which ran deep veins of the purest gold. In some respects it was a hard nature, with certain tender qualities; and nowhere was there to be found an ounce of base metal; a pitiless nature, which knew not how to forgive either its own faults or those of his fellow-men. If his judgments of others were harsh, his self-despair was sometimes fanatical. His ideal of manhood was as pure and noble as was that of the perfect King Arthur; that he failed a hundred times a day in living up to it, had not the effect of lowering that ideal one hair’s-breadth. His highest duty was towards his own soul and its struggle to reach the perfection he held it to be capable of attaining. With the mind of an ascetic, he was endowed with a warm, sensuous temperament, having a passionate delight in beauty, light, and color, and capable of living through the senses with the keen enjoyment of a Sybarite. A strain of music, a beautiful flower, or a fair child moved him to a degree of pleasure that to any nature save an artistic one was incomprehensible. Filled with pity at the sight of distress, he would unhesitatingly give his last dollar to a needy rascal; but if appealed to for sympathy by the same sinner, the scorching contempt by which he would blast the shameful deeds for which, to him, there was no palliation, would leave the wrong-doer a sadder if not a wiser man. Because he expected so much of men, their short-comings outraged him. To a man of this character it was easier, if not better, to avoid the paths of his fellows; and his life had often been that of a hermit, even when he dwelt in the busiest cities of the world. Not willing that one shadow from the burden of his life should fall upon the paths of those who cared for him, his voice and face were always cheery when in their company. He wanted not the sympathy of man or woman, and endured what griefs were given him to bear in silence and alone. That divine mandate, "Bear ye one another’s burdens," was meaningless to him; for he had ever borne his burden unsupported and unhelped.