Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Welcome Footsteps painting

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Welcome Footsteps paintingSir Lawrence Alma-Tadema promise of spring paintingSir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Courtship the Proposal painting
fellow's dress, if extreme, was not unique -- one may see as strange at any gathering of student artists, and I myself in disorderly moods will wear mungos and shoddies, though my preference is for the conventional. But your average bohemian's manner is shy as a kindergartener's with those he respects, and overweening with everyone else, while my caller's was neither: brisk, forthright, cordial, he plunked his paper-box onto my desk, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and both hands at the cane-top, and rested his chin upon all, so that his striking beard hung over. Disconcerting as the grin he then waited my pleasure with was the cast of his features, not just like any I had seen. Such of his kind as had strayed into my office thitherto were either dark of beard, coal-eyed, and intense, after the model of a poet they admired, or else had hair the shade of wheatstraw, forget-me-not eyes, and the aspect and deportment of gelded fawns. Not so this chap: his bronze beard; his eyes not pale nor tormented but simply a-dance; his wiry musculature, the curl of his smile, even a small odor about his person that was neither of dirt or cologne -- in a word, he wascaprine : I vow the term came to mind before I'd ever spoken to him, much less read what he'd brought me. And that walking-stick, that instrument without parallel. . .
"Don't fear," he said directly -- in a clear, almost a ringing