rous attention and
gratuitous criticism, especially the picture he was chiefly engaged
upon. This, when it was shown at the County Fair, where Ludlow chose to
enter it, before he took it back to Now York with him in the fall, did
not keep the crowd away from the trotting-matches, and it did not take
either the first or the second premium. In fact, if the critics of the
metropolis were right in their judgment of it when it appeared later in
the Academy, it did not deserve either of them. They said that it was
an offence to those who had hoped better things of the painter as time
went on with him, and who would now find themselves snubbed by this
return to his worst manner. Here, they said, was his palette again,
with a tacit invitation to the public to make what it liked of the
colors, as children did with the embers on the hearth, or the frost on
the window. You paid your money and you took your choice as to what Mr.
Ludlow meant by this extraordinary performance, if he really meant
anything at all.

As far as it could be made out with the naked eye, it represented a
clump of hollyhocks, with a slim, shadowy and uncertain young girl
among them, and the painter had apparently wished to suggest a family,
resemblance among them all. To this end he had emphasized some facts of
the girl's dress, accessories to his purpose, the petal-edged ruffle of
her crimson silk waist, the flower-like flare of her red hat, and its
finials of knotted ribbon; and in the hollyhocks he had recognized a
girlishness of bearing, which he evidently hoped would appeal to a
fantastic sympathy in the spectator. The piece was called "Hollyhocks";
it might equally well be called "Girls," though when you had called it
one or the other, it would be hard to say just what you were to do
about it, especially with the impression curiously left by the picture
that whether it was a group of girls, or a clump of hollyhocks, they
were not in very good humor. The moment chosen, if one might judge from
some suggestions of light, was that just before the breaking of a
thunderstorm; the girl, if it was a girl, had flashed into sight round
the corner of the house where the hollyhocks, if they were hollyhocks,
were blowing outward in the first gust of the storm. It could not be
denied that there was something fine in the wild toss and pull of the
flowers, with the abandon of the storm in them; this was the best thing
in the piece. It was probably intended to express