ched _Ye Hutte_ from Cookham station--Ye Hutte set
amid bushy and climbing roses upon a prominent knoll of the many-knolled
Dean--we ceased to wonder that our picturesque imaginings of the region
we were passing through had been so various. Artists were before us,
artists behind us, artists on every side of us, two sketching-umbrellas
glinting like great tropical flowers in a corn-field, another like a
huge daisy in the dim vista of a long lane.

"C---- lodges in that red cottage, B---- in the next one, H---- in this
tumble-down farm-house, the L----s in that row of laborers' cottages,
the D----s in the inn," said Mona, tripping lightly over well-known
names, whose most accustomed place is in the exhibition catalogues.

Through the open windows of a hideous brick row, built to hold as many
laborers' families all the year round and as many Bohemian summer
artists as can crowd therein, we caught glimpses of tapestries worth
their weight in gold. One well-known artist has taken possession of the
end of this uncomely row, intended for a supply-shop to the
neighborhood. This shop is his studio, which he has filled with
treasures of Japanese art. As a Cookhamite assured us, "Mr. C---- goes
in for the _Japanesque_;" and he screens the large display-windows
intended for cheese, raisins, and potted meats with smiling mandarins
and narrow-eyed houris under octopus-like trees.

At the rear of the same "Row" we recognized a broad-hatted figure once
familiar to us in the Quartier Latin and the artistic _auberges_ of the
Forest of Fontainebleau. The very personification of _insouciance_ and
_laissez-aller_, he whose tiny bedroom-studio up-stairs ran riot with
color caught among California mountains, in cool gray France and
ochreous England, was bending the whole force of his mind to sketching a
pouter pigeon preening itself upon a barrel.

Still another of the ugly cottages, cursed by artists but inhabited by
them, was hired at ten pounds a year by two young landscapists. A
charwoman came every morning to quell the mad riots in which the
household gods (or demons) diurnally engaged, but at all other times the
landscapists manoeuvred for themselves. That the domestic manoeuvring of
young landscapists is not always _toute rose_ we saw reason later to
believe. For not once, twice, nor yet so seldom as a dozen times, have
we seen these young manoeuvrers begin to dine at four, when shadows
were growing too long upon field, thicket, and