The story was wonderfully told: the picture was a poem on canvas--full of human nature, brimming over with sympathy. As a work of art--for conception, drawing, perspective colour, it was truly a grand picture; and Arthur felt his success as he sat before it that morning, when the sun was shining upon the dead man at Barton Hall. On the next day, before the picture could hardly be said to be dry, Arthur had it packed, and he posted with it to London, where he had arranged for it to be hung at a winter exhibition. Josephs the dealer, who had previously purchased everything Mr. Phillips chose to let him have, had heard some whisper about it, and had visited Arthur the week before; but the artist could not be prevailed upon to show the picture to anybody but his old housekeeper who had nursed him when he was a boy, and she had sat before it and cried and sobbed over it almost heart-broken: then Arthur felt that he had painted a great picture, and he knew it when he unveiled it again in that long room in Suffolk-street, Pall Mall, before a small critical company. In a few hours “Seeking New Homes” was talked of in artistic and literary society all over London, and when everybody was asking everybody else if they had seen the new picture, Arthur Phillips drove down to Paddington and took a ticket for Avonworth. CHAPTER V. THE TWO TEMPLES. The success of Christabel, “the mysterious lady,” in some new business at the Severntown races, together with the high appreciation which the working classes exhibited of the tricks of “Momus” and his master, induced the showman to make a considerable stay at Severntown. Mr. Henry Bilks, “the only living skeleton extant,” had also made overtures to Mr. Martin to join him in a permanent winter exhibition, and, so strangely does one thing influence another, that the advertisement of Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs played its part in the scheme. The Temple of Magic had already been removed to the Blue Post’s Yard, where “the riders” and other companies of public entertainers usually took their stand; the public had already been addressed in grandiloquent terms, in very grey ink, on very thin paper; and Mr. Dibble had solemnly done duty “on the outside” for many nights, when Mr. Bilks drove to the side-door, (“private entrance, ladies and gentlemen, at the side, price three pence!”), and without further ado went behind the magic curtain, and offered to join the wizard for the winter season, if the wizard would take a shop in some public street, advertise the exhibition, and conduct it upon something like high-class principles. The “living skeleton” had left with the showman copies of various testimonials, and a copy of the _Slumkey Guardian_. It was in this latter journal that Martin had spelled out the Loan Office advertisement, whereupon he dictated to Dibble the terms of a letter which should be sent to James Marfleeting, Esq.