ng looked one pale, yellowish, brownish tint
with the glare of the sun, would have boldly taken a weak wash of all
the drab-looking colours in his box right over everything, picked out a
few stones in his foreground wall, dodged in a few shadows and so on,
and made a clever sketch of it. And the same with Eleanor's. If he had
got his birch-trees half as good as hers, and had then seen what a
muddle the trees behind were in, I believe he would only have washed in
a little blue and grey behind the birches, 'indicated' (as our old
drawing-master at school calls it) a distant stem or two--and there
would have been another clever sketch for you!"

"Another clever falsehood, you mean," said Clement hotly, "to ruin
people's taste, and encourage idle painters in showy trickery, and make
them believe they can improve upon Nature's colouring."

"Nature's colouring varies," said Jack. "Distant trees often _are_ blue
and grey, though these, just now, are of the rankest green."

Clement replied, Jack responded, Clement retorted, and a fierce
art-discussion raged the whole way home.

We were well used to it. Indeed all conversations with us had a tendency
to become controversial. Over and above which there was truth in
Keziah's saying, "The young gentlemen argle-bargles fit to deave a
body's head; and dear knows what it's all about."

Clement finished a vehement and rather didactic confession of his
art-faith as we climbed the steep hill to the Vicarage. The keynote of
it was that one ought to draw what he sees, exactly as he sees it; and
that every subject has a beauty of its own which he ought to perceive if
his perception is not "emasculated by an acquired taste for
prettinesses."

"I shall be in the 'Household Album' this evening," said Jack, in
deliberate tones. "My next ambition is the Society of Painters in Water
Colours. The subject of my first painting is settled. Three grass fields
(haymaking over the day before yesterday). A wall in front of the first
field, a hedge in front of the second, a wall in front of the third. A
gate in the middle of the wall. A spotted pig in the middle of the
field. The sun at its meridian; the pig asleep. Motto, 'Whatever is, is
beautiful.'"

Eleanor and I (in the interests of peace) hastened to change the
subject by ridiculing Jack's complacent conviction that his sketch would
be accepted for the "Household Album."

And yet it was.

The fresh-water _alga_ Jack had been lucky enough