“One day a customer of Miss Penstock’s brought Nat a book about grapes, which had some pictures of the different methods of grape-culture in different countries.  One of these pictures pleased him very much.  It showed the grape-vines looped on low trees, in swinging festoons.  He had the book propped up open at that picture day after day, and kept drawing it over and over on the blackboard and on paper till I was tired of the sight of it.  It did not seem to me remarkably pretty.  But Nat said one day, when I told him so,—­

“’It isn’t the picture itself, but what I want to make from it.  Don’t you see that the trees look a little like dancers whirling round, holding each other by the hand—­one-legged dancers?’

“I could not see it.  ‘Well,’ said Nat, ’look at this, and see if you can see it any better;’ and he drew out of his portfolio a sheet with a rough charcoal sketch of six or seven low, gnarled, bare trees, with their boughs inter-locked in such a fantastic manner that the trees seemed absolutely reeling about in a crazy dance.  I laughed as soon as I saw it.  ‘There!’ said Nat triumphantly; ’now, if I can only get the vines to go just as I want them to, in and out, you see that will dress up the dancers.’  He worked long over this design.  The fancy seemed to have taken possession of his brain.  He gave names to the trees, but he called them all men:  ‘It’s a jolly crew of old kings,’ he said; ’that’s Sesostris at the head, and there’s Herod; that old fellow with the gouty stomach under his left arm.’  Nat was now so full of freaks and fun, that our little room rang with laughter night after night.  Patrick used to sit on the floor sometimes, with his broad Irish mouth stiffened into a perpetual grin at the sight of the mirth, which, though he could not comprehend it, he found contagious.

“‘But what will you do with it, Nat?’ said I.  ’It will never do for a calico pattern.’

“‘I don’t know,’ said he reflectively; ’I might make it smaller and hide the faces, and not make the limbs of the trees look so much like legs, and call it the “vine pattern,” and I guess old Wilkins would think it was graceful, and I dare say Miss Wilkins would wear it, if nobody else did.’

“‘Oh!  Nat, Nat, how can you,’ exclaimed I, ’when they have been so good to pay us so much money?’

“‘I know it,’ said Nat, ’it’s too bad; I’m ashamed now.  But doesn’t this look like the two Wilkins brothers?  You said they looked like frogs?’ he ran on, holding up a most ludicrous picture of two tall, lank frogs standing behind a counter, and stretching out four front legs like greedy hands across the counter, with a motto coming out of the right-hand frog’s mouth:  ’More designs, if you please, Mr. Kent—­something light and graceful for summer wear.’

“These were the words of a note which Mr. Wilkins had sent to Nat a few weeks before.  I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, for really the frogs did look like the brothers Wilkins.  The picture haunted my mind for weeks afterward, and seemed somehow to revive my old distrust of them.