uch of a canal--not much of a painting ground, really, to the
masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly
lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble
disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once
out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches
a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies
hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and
patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the
whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long
brick wall of the garden--soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and
lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and
sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches
interwoven with cinnobar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun
drips gold.

Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass--this canal of
mine; only deep enough to let a wine barge slip through; so narrow you
must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola;
so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its
water-surface part of everything about it, so clear are the
reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space--one
moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from
behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next
swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a
mirror; then, when aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into
ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings,
flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside
down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a
bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in
detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole
scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any
painter living or dead.

These are some of the joys of the painter whose north light is the
sky, whose studio door is never shut, and who often works surrounded
by envious throngs, that treat him with such marked reverence that
they whisper one to another for fear of disturbing him.

* * * * *

And now for a few practical hints born of these experiences; and in
giving them to you, remember that no man is more keenly conscious of
his limitations than the speaker. My o