CHAPTER X.THE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN FATHER AND SON.
We pass over an interval of some months.
A painter stood at work at the easel, his human model before him.

He was employed on a nymph,--the Nymph Galatea.

The subject had been taken before by Salvator, whose genius found all its elements in the wild rocks, gnarled, fantastic trees, and gushing waterfalls of the landscape; in the huge ugliness of Polyphemus the lover; in the grace and suavity and unconscious abandonment of the nymph, sleeking her tresses dripping from the bath.

The painter, on a larger canvas (for Salvator's picture, at least the one we have seen, is among the small sketches of the great artistic creator of the romantic and grotesque), had transferred the subject of the master; but he had left subordinate the landscape and the giant, to concentrate all his art on the person of the nymph.

Middle-aged was the painter, in truth; but he looked old.
His hair, though long, was gray and thin; his face was bloated by intemperance; and his hand trembled much, though, from habit, no trace of the tremor was visible in his work.
A boy, near at hand, was also employed on the same subject, with a rough chalk and a bold freedom of touch.