Improvement had come, however, hand in hand with patient industry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was now incontestable.

It was as yet but scantily recognized, and he had hard work to live.

Rowland hung his little water-colors on the parlor wall, and found that, as he lived with them, he grew very fond of them.

Singleton was a diminutive, dwarfish personage; he looked like a precocious child.

He had a high, protuberant forehead, a transparent brown eye, a perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and patience.