A CALICO-PAINTER.

Rocjean was finishing his after-dinnerical coffee and cigar, when looking up from Las Novedades, containing the latest news from Madrid, and in which he had just read en Roma es donde hay mas mendigos, Rome, is where most beggars are found; London, where most engineers, lost women, and rat-terriers, abound; Brussels, where women who smoke, are all round—looking up from this interesting reading, he saw opposite him a young man, whose acquaintance he knew at a glance, was worth making. Refinement, common-sense, and energy were to be read plainly in his face. When he left the café, Rocjean asked an artist, with long hair, who was fast smoking himself to the color of the descendants of Ham, if he knew the man?'

'No-o-oo, I believe he's some kind of a calico-painter.'

'What?'

'Oh! a feller that makes designs for a calico-mill.'

Not long afterward Rocjean was introduced to him, and found him, as first impressions taught him he would—a man well worth knowing. Ho was making a holiday-visit to Rome, his settled residence being in Paris, where his occupation was designer of patterns for a large calico-mill in the United States. A New-Yorker by birth, consequently more of a cosmopolitan than the provincial life of our other American cities will tolerate or can create in their children, Charles Gordon was every inch a man, and a bitter foe to every liar and thief. He was well informed, for he had, as a boy, been solidly instructed; he was polite, refined, for he had been well educated. His life was a story often told: mercantile parent, very wealthy; son sent to college; talent for art, developed at the expense of trigonometry and morning-prayers; mercantile parent fails, and falls from Fifth avenue to Brooklyn, preparatory to embarking for the land of those who have failed and fallen—wherever that is. Son wears long hair, and believes he looks like the painter who was killed by a baker's daughter, writes trashy verses about a man who was wronged, and went off and howled himself to a long repose, sick of this vale of tears, et cetera. Finally, in the midst of his despair, long hair, bad poetry and painting, an enterprising friend, who sees he has an eye for color, its harmonies and contrasts, raises him with a strong hand into the clear atmosphere of exertion for a useful and definite end—makes him a 'calico-painter.'

It was a great scandal for the Bohemians of art to find this calico-painter received every where in refined and intelligent society, while they, with all their airs, long hairs, and shares of impudence, could not enter—they, the creators of Medoras, Magdalens, Our Ladies of Lorette, Brigands' Brides, Madame not In, Captive Knights, Mandoline Players, Grecian Mothers, Love in Repose, Love in Sadness, Moonlight on the Waves, Last Tears, Resignation, Broken Lutes, Dutch Flutes, and other mock-sentimental-titled paintings.

'God save me from being a gazelle!' said the monkey.

'God save us from being utility calico-painters!' cried the high-minded, dirty cavaliers who were not cavaliers, as they once more rolled over in their smoke-house.

'In 1854,' said Gordon, one day, to Rocjean, after their acquaintance had ripened into friendship, 'I was indeed in sad circumstances, and was passing through a phase of life when bad tobacco, acting on an empty stomach, gave me a glimpse of the Land of the Grumblers. One long year, and all that was changed; then I woke up to reality and practical life in a 'Calico-Mill;' then I wrote the lines you have asked me about. Take them for what they are worth.