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this frame before. It was not intended for a print, but for an oil-painting. It was of fine ebony, beautifully and curiously carved. I looked at it with growing interest, and when my aunt's housemaid -- I had retained her modest staff of servants -- came in with the lamp, I asked her how long the print had been there.
"Mistress only bought it two. days before she was took ill," she said; "but the frame -- she didn't want to buy a new one -- so she got this out of the attic. There's lots of curious old things there, sir."
"Had my aunt had this frame long?"
"Oh, yes, sir. It must have come long before I did, and I've been here seven years come Christmas. There was a picture in it. That's upstairs too -- but it's that black and ugly it might as well be a chimney-back."
I felt a desire to see this picture. What if it were some priceless old master, in which my aunt's eyes had only seen rubbish?
Directly after breakfast next morning, I paid a visit to the attic.
It was crammed with old furniture enough to stock a curiosity shop. All the house was furnished solidly in the Mid-Victorian style, and in this room everything not in keeping with the drawing-room suite ideal was stowed away. Tables of papier-maché and mother-of-pearl, straight-backed chairs with twisted feet and faded needle-work cushions, fire-screens of gilded carving and beaded banners, oak bureaux with brass handles, a little worktable with its faded, moth-eaten, silk flutings hanging in disconsolate shreds; on these, and the dust that covered them, blazed the full daylight as I pulled up the blinds. I promised myself a good time in re-enshrining these household gods in my parlour, and promoting the Victorian suite to the attic. But at present my business was to find the picture as "black as the chimney back"; and presently, behind a heap of fenders and boxes, I found it.
Jane, the housemaid, identified it at once. I took it downstairs carefully, and examined it. Neither subject nor colour was disti