I was young, and up to within a few months life had stretched brightly before me, with the prospect of a brilliant career.
And now what was I?
A wretched invalid--a burden to myself and to others--a broken spar flung with other fragments of ship wrecked lives on the great ocean of Time, there to be whirled away and forgotten.

But a rescue was approaching; a rescue sudden and marvellous, of which, in my wildest fancies, I had never dreamed.
Staying in the same hotel with us was a young Italian artist, Raffaello Cellini by name.

His pictures were beginning to attract a great deal of notice, both in Paris and Rome: not only for their faultless drawing, but for their wonderfully exquisite colouring.

So deep and warm and rich were the hues he transferred to his canvases, that others of his art, less fortunate in the management of the palette, declared he must have invented some foreign compound whereby he was enabled to deepen and brighten his colours for the time being; but that the effect was only temporary, and that his pictures, exposed to the air for some eight or ten years, would fade away rapidly, leaving only the traces of an indistinct blur.

Others, more generous, congratulated him on having discovered the secrets of the old masters.