I warrant ye now thar gang are bent
To tek fwonk in by jugglin’;
Some cut purse dow-for-nought, nae doubt,
That deevilments hev skill in,
An’ some’at com’ weel leaden out
May gang widout a shillin’.”
Rosley Fair, by J. Stagg.
The intimate friend and bosom companion of M. le Comte de Sanschemise was Adolphe Sheek, Peinteur et Philosophe, and a recent addition to the small French colony that had located itself in the best bed-room of Parthenon House.
Adolphe was, by profession, an artist in hair—ingeniously forming weeping willows out of auburn tresses, and baskets of flowers out of chesnut, or, indeed, any other kind of locks. His hairy nosegays, he boasted, were the admiration of all who had seen them; and his flaxen roses and raven lilies he prided himself upon being the perfection of imitative art. Still, the hairy art was merely an imitative one, and the talented Sheek had a soul for nobler things. He had occasionally soared as high as a fancy composition in hair, and had executed an elaborate hairy marine piece, displaying a hairy sea and a hairy ship in the distance, with a hairy cottage, thatched with hair, in the foreground, and a small hairy pond in front of it, with two hairy ducks swimming among a thicket of hairy weeds.
But, alas! there was no encouragement for genius in hair, so the magnanimous Adolphe had determined—in an artistical point of view at least—to cut his hair, and devote himself to what he was pleased to call the sister art. This consisted in taking portraits in black paper by means of the “machine”—and adding the additional attraction of gold hair and whiskers, for a small extra charge. But Sheek, in his heart, despised the means of living that prudence compelled him to adopt—though he occasionally indulged in a full, or three-quarter face, executed in crayon, water colours, or oil, whenever he was fortunate enough to obtain a sitter; and though he had already produced several highly natural “larder pieces,” in the shape of quartern loaves, gammons of bacon, pots of porter, and wedges of double Glo’ster, each having the same small mouse nibbling at the corner; and though his moonlight pieces had been highly admired, especially the reflection of the moon on the water, and the light in the cottage-window beside the water-mill, still Sheek longed to signalize himself in higher branches of the pictorial art, and was now devoting his leisure to the completion of an historic production, that he hoped might link his name with the great artists of the age.