His joy was unbounded, but
scarcely excelled my own when I succeeded in making a water-color sketch
of himself, the hair a shade or two less flame-colored than was natural,
and which even Hubert pronounced a very fair likeness. Then in the large,
stately drawing-room, some of whose furnishing dated back a century or
more, stood a fine, grand piano. Here I studied over again my school
lessons, or tried new ventures from some of the masters. What dreams I
had in that dim room in the pauses of my music; peopling that place again
with the vanished ones who had loved and suffered there my own dead
parents among the rest, whose faces looked down at me, I thought
tenderly, from the walls where their portraits hung in heavy carved
frames, of a fashion a generation old. There was about my mother's face a
haunting expression, as of a well known face which long afterward looked
out at me one day from my own reflection in the mirror and then, to my
joy, I discovered I was like her in feature and expression. In the
library too, whose key Mr. Winthrop had left with Mrs. Flaxman for my
use, I found an unexplored wonderland. My literature had chiefly
consisted of the text book variety, and if I had possessed wider range,
my time was so fully occupied with lessons I could not have availed
myself of the privilege; but now, with what relish I went from shelf to
shelf, dipping into a book here and another there, taking by turns
poetry, history, fiction, and biography, Shakespeare and Milton had so
often perplexed me in Grammar and analysis, that I left them for the most
part severely alone; but there were others, fresh and new to me as a June
morning, and quite as refreshing: Hubert used sometimes to join me, but
we generally disagreed.
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