Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/15

 their dainty wings in a tiny fountain playing in the centre of the cage. A bare deal table, a lounge which had lost its cover, a worn horsehair armchair, and a set of unpainted pine shelves laden with books, completed the contents of the apartment, with one notable exception. On the mouldy, unpapered wall hung an unframed picture representing the head and shoulders of a man. At the first glance it might have passed for an ancient copy or original study of a head of Christ. On closer examination it was seen to be only the portrait of a man whose features bore the stamp of the highest intellectual beauty,—a long, delicate face, with a broad, unruffled forehead, large eyes of that indefinable gray-blue tint which neither color describes, a thin, delicate nose, and a mouth of rare beauty and sensitiveness. The hair and beard, of a golden brown, fell about the shoulders, and below, folded upon the breast, were the white, nervous hands, with a delicate blue tracery of veins. If any one unsatisfied with this examination should have looked more closely at the picture, he would have been able to make out this inscription: "Philip Rondelet, from his friend Hans Makart." By the fading light of that short winter day let us look into the face of the man who is still gazing out into the sunlight slowly waning from the square below. It is the same face as that in the