For, you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.

A true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-defined mental physiognomy.

Besides this, many young girls have a strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.

Even in physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.

One of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young fellow of sixteen.
Another was in the way of climbing tall trees for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can "shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-water mark.