of my acquaintance with English objects, but a part of the
general texture of the small, dense landscape, which looked as if the
harvest were gathered by the shears. Everything was full of expression
for Mark Ambient's visitor,--from the big, bandy-legged geese, whose
whiteness was a "note," amid all the tones of green, as they wandered
beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and
whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign,--from
these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a
gable or a pinnacle peep here and there, and looked, even at a distance,
like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I
admired the hedgerows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was
forever stopping to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths
across the fields, which wandered, in a diagonal of finer grain, from
one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured,
and was as much entertained with my observations as I was with the
literary allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked upon stiles,
broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across
a park or two, where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the
old woman at the gate; we skirted rank covers, which rustled here and
there as wo passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery
hillside, where, if the sun was not too hot, neither was the earth
too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist.
Of course I had already told Ambient what I thought of his new novel,
having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before
I went to bed.

"I am not without hope of being able to make it my best," he said, as I
went back to the subject, while we turned up our heels to the sky. "At
least the people who dislike my prose--and there are a great many of
them, I believe--will dislike this work most" This was the first time I
had heard him allude to the people who couldn't read him,--a class which
is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of
letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was,
must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness,
of irritability; the artistic _ego_, capable in some cases of such
monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently
erect and definite. I will not therefore go so far as to say that he
never thought of his detract