ilding, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch
vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact. It was
erected by some dissenting society for public worship: hence its
interior is one immense vaulted room, with cathedral-like windows and
choir-gallery across one end. "The body of the house," to speak
ecclesiastically, is cumbered with easels and the usual chaotic
_impedimenta_ of painters. The choir, ascended by a ladder, holds three
tiny cot-beds, while beneath the choir and concealed by beautiful
draperies are stored the domestic and culinary paraphernalia,--pots,
pans, brushes, dishes, and, above all, the multiplicity of petroleum- and
spirit-stoves in which the Bohemian artistic soul delights. Ye Hutte is
an artist's studio, and its name may be found in all the exhibition
catalogues, for several generations of painters drift through it every
year. As one inmate rushes off to the Continent, the sea-shore, or the
mountains, another takes his place. Yet Ye Hutte holds scant place in
its real owner's esteem compared with that larger studio owned by all
the Dean artists in common, where all their summer's work is done, and
which is parquetted with grain-field gold and meadow emerald, walled
with rainbow horizons, and roofed with azure festooned with spun silk.
Ye Hutte is better appreciated as evening rendezvous for the
palette-bearing hosts, both male and female, who, sunbrowned and tired,
partake there of restful social converse as well as of the hospitable
cup that cheers. Evening after evening, by twos and threes, they sit in
the moonlight under the silver-touched vines and dewy blossoms of the
porch, listening to the far-away cry of night-birds, the murmur of
drowsy bells upon cattle stirring in sleep, or of human voices idealized
by remoteness into faint haunting music, while before them white light
touches the wooded heights of Cliefden,--distant heights full of
picturesque mystery and passionate history,--touches and idealizes into
a semblance of poetic realism the sham ruins of Hedsor, and spreads a
pearly sheen over the unseen Valley of the Shadow of Light through which
winds the quiet Thames.

To the usual artistic circle of Ye Hutte is often added a not
uncongenial element from the outside world, sometimes even from within
the borders of Philistia. Story-tellers, moved by the subtile magnetism
of the artistic creative faculty, whether of brush, chisel, or pen, come
up sometimes from