ost part, yet when people take to
writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life,
or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that
life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves? How is it that we find
the dreadful times of the past so interesting to us--in pictures and
poetry?"

Old Hammond smiled. "It always was so, and I suppose always will be,"
said he, "however it may be explained. It is true that in the nineteenth
century, when there was so little art and so much talk about it, there
was a theory that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with
contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there was any pretence
of it, the author always took care (as Clara hinted just now) to
disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way or another make it
strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as
well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs."

"Well," said Dick, "surely it is but natural to like these things
strange; just as when we were children, as I said just now, we used to
pretend to be so-and-so in such-and-such a place. That's what these
pictures and poems do; and why shouldn't they?"

"Thou hast hit it, Dick," quoth old Hammond; "it is the child-like part
of us that produces works of imagination. When we are children time
passes so slow with us that we seem to have time for everything."

He sighed, and then smiled and said: "At least let us rejoice that we
have got back our childhood again. I drink to the days that are!"

"Second childhood," said I in a low voice, and then blushed at my double
rudeness, and hoped that he hadn't heard. But he had, and turned to me
smiling, and said: "Yes, why not? And for my part, I hope it may last
long; and that the world's next period of wise and unhappy manhood, if
that should happen, will speedily lead us to a third childhood: if indeed
this age be not our third. Meantime, my friend, you must know that we
are too happy, both individually and collectively, to trouble ourselves
about what is to come hereafter."

"Well, for my part," said Clara, "I wish we were interesting enough to be
written or painted about."

Dick answered her with some lover's speech, impossible to be written
down, and then we sat quiet a little.

CHAPTER XVII: HOW THE CHANGE CAME

Dick broke the silence at last, saying: "Guest, forgive us for a little
after-dinner dulness. What would y