n?" asked the little boy.

"It--er--means--One moment, dear; I think I hear your father calling."

She ran downstairs and consulted the dictionary.

"A _chiaroscurist_," she told her little boy when she returned to the
bedroom, "is a painter who cares for and studies light and shade rather
than colour. Now go to sleep. You're too young to bother about such
things."

This child's mother was an ardent Ruskinian. Observing that her husband,
the citizen and golfer, was asleep in his chair when she returned from her
son's bedroom, she stepped into the library, picked _Modern Painters_ from
the shelf, and read the following passages, gravely shaking her head
occasionally as she read.

"... Rembrandt always chooses to represent the exact force with which the
light on the most illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer
portions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth,
he sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture; and the
expression of every character of objects which depends on tenderness of
shape or tint. But he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque and
forcible expression is dependent upon it, with magnificent skill and
subtlety.

"... His love of darkness led also to a loss of the spiritual element, and
was itself the reflection of a sombre mind....

"... I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished,
as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of
his darkness and the dulness of his light. Glorious or inglorious, the
speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the
best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight. It was
the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see--by
rushlight...."

Had Ruskin, one wonders, ever seen _The Syndics_ at Amsterdam, or the
_Portrait of his Mother_, and the _Singing Boy_ at Vienna, or _The Old
Woman_ at St. Petersburg, or the _Christ at Emmaus_ at the Louvre, or any
of the etchings?

The time came when the child was allowed to visit the National Gallery
unattended; but although he never lost his affectionate awe for the two dim
interiors, he did not really begin to appreciate Rembrandt until he had
reached manhood. Rembrandt is too learned in the pathos of life, too deeply
versed in realities, to win the suffrages of youth. But he was attracted by
another portrait in the National Gallery--that called _A Jewish