I am he of whom it was said that he was famous when he was beardless.

Observe me now! What care I so that I can still see the world and the men and women about me--'When I want rest for my mind, it is not honours I crave, but liberty.'" [Illustration: REMBRANDT LEANING ON A STONE SILL 1640.

National Gallery, London.] Twenty-eight seemed a great age to the child; but he thought it wonderful that the portrait of an _Old Lady_ at the National Gallery should have been painted when Rembrandt was but twenty-eight.

She was too strong and determined for his liking, and he wondered why some of Rembrandt's pictures, like _The Woman taken in Adultery_, should be so mysterious and poetical, and others like this old lady so lifelike and straightforward.

He was too young to understand that the composition of the fortuitous concourse of atoms called Rembrandt, included not only the power that Velasquez possessed in so supreme a degree of painting just what his eyes saw, exemplified by this portrait of _An Old Lady_, aged 83, and by the portrait of _Elizabeth Bas_ at Amsterdam, but that it also included the great gift of creative imagination, exemplified by the _Christ at Emmaus_, and _The Good Samaritan_ of the Louvre, and in a way by the _Portrait of a Slav Prince_ at the Hermitage, where a man in the alembic of Rembrandt's imagination has become a type.