But there is a something which recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many years ago! I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.
Are we not young?
Are we not fresh and blooming?
Wait, a bit.

The artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.

Five years .-- The artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the eyebrows.

Ten years .-- The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling or other change of feature .-- Hold on! Stop that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that interesting period of life when Mr.Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?
There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article, getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.

Is he not a POET that painted us?
"Blest be the art that can immortalize!" COWPER.
-- Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation, and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor.