"It is a pleasant pastime," said Flemming; "and I perceive you are very skilful. I am delighted to see, that you can draw a straight line. I never before saw a lady's sketch-book, in which all the towers did not resemble the leaning Tower of Pisa. I always tremble for the little men under them."
"How absurd!" exclaimed Mary Ashburton, with a smile that passed through the misty air of Flemming's thoughts, like a sunbeam; "For one, I succeed much better in straight lines than in any others. Here I have been trying a half-hour to make this water-wheel round; and round it never will be."
"Then let it remain as it is. It looks uncommonly picturesque, and may pass for a new invention."
The lady continued to sketch, and Flemming to gaze at her beautiful face; often repeating to himself those lines in Marlow's Faust;
"O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"
He certainly would have betrayed himself to the maternal eye of Mrs. Ashburton, had she not been wholly absorbed in the follies of a fashionable novel. Ere long the fair sketcher had paused for a moment; and Flemming had taken her sketch-book in his hands and was looking it through from the beginning with ever-increasing delight, half of which he dared not express, though he favored her with some comments and bursts of admiration.
"This is truly a very beautiful sketch of Murten and the battle-field! How quietly the land-scape sleeps there by the lake, after the battle! Did you ever read the ballad of Veit Weber, the shoe-maker, on this subject? He says, the routed Burgundians jumped into the lake, and the Swiss Leaguers shot them down like wild ducks among the reeds. He fought in the battle and wrote the ballad afterwards;--
'He had himself laid hand on sword,
He who this rhyme did write;