All the objects in Padiham’s shop, one after another, caught my look, as I reviewed the whole in memory. Suddenly I found myself gazing intently at my image of those two water-color drawings in neat gilt frames, hanging in a dusky corner by the chimney,—those two drawings which had revived in my mind the sentiment of the bright, healthy roses in the upper windows.
Suddenly these drawings recurred to me. They stared at me like an old friend neglected. They insisted upon my recognition. There was a personality in them which gazed at me with a shy and sad reproach, that I had given them only a careless glance, and so passed them by.
The drawings stared at me and I at them.
An ancient, many-gabled brick manor-house, on a fair lawn dotted with stately oaks,—that was the first.
Had I not already seen a drawing, the fellow of this? Yes. In Biddulph’s hands at Fort Laramie. The same gables, the same sweet slope of lawn, the same broad oaks, and one the monarch of them all,—perhaps the very one Wordsworth had rounded into a sonnet.
And the companion drawing that I hardly deciphered in the dimness,—that group of figures and a horse bending over them?
How blind I was!
Fulano!
Fulano surely. He and no other.
And that group?