Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/76

 salt-mine. They are thoughts which do not vex children, and the young girl was, as her friend Sara Harden often said, still a child in most respects. The work was finished. That very night the scaffolding was to be knocked away. Her fingers lingered lovingly over the surface which she should never touch again. With her chisel she deepened a line here, and shaved off a particle of crystal there. She was taking farewell of the face which she had freed from the living wall of salt. How she had enjoyed cutting the clear white crystal from the features which she almost believed were behind it!

"I am only unveiling the face of the salt-spirit," she had said a dozen times when her father and the cutter of stone had warned her that she was working too hastily in the brittle material. She had understood instinctively the soft, friable, salt crystal, and had used her chisel with more dexterity than her colleague, hampered by the traditions of his trade.

"None but a novice would have attempted it," said the workman admiringly. "A novice and a woman! Only novices and women achieve the impossible."

"And genius, Antonio," added the General sententiously, claiming for his daughter the supreme of gifts. Stuart Ruysdale was a modest man as far as he himself was concerned; but