om the sunny South back to the cheerless North. It
was in January, and I was returning from Italy, where I had spent some
months, to my own home and hearth; back to the chimney that I knew would
smoke, to the pipes that would probably burst, and the blacks that would
certainly fly. Serpentining along the coast of the Riviera, I awoke in
the early morning and peeped through the window just by my side in the
sleeping-car. Farewell to the sea and to the sparkle on the playful
little waves that were gently breaking against the shrub-covered rocks;
farewell to the middle distance and to the distance, and generally to
anything worthy to be termed a horizon. Presently all that will be
replaced by somebody's stone wall opposite my own stone wall, or by a
growler or a Piccadilly lamp-post in a fog. And I shall wear a thick
overcoat out of doors, and sit peacefully installed at my own
writing-table in-doors. And the organ-grinder will come to grind under
my windows, and to remind me of the country I love so well--and he will
keep on grinding till it is time to get up and conduct him to the
nearest police-station.

Then, too, I shall meet my friends, and they will ask me where I have
been, and tell me where they have been; and, one and all, they will want
to know what I am painting for the Royal Academy, and not have the
slightest notion how insulting the question is, particularly if--_il n'y
a que la verite qui blesse_--I _have_ been painting _for_ the Royal
Academy.

That is what I was thinking as we popped into tunnels and out again into
the bright sunshine. Then--I don't know whether I fell asleep or whether
I kept awake--but I certainly dreamt the most beautiful pictures ever
painted. I could not put them on canvas to save my life, any more than I
could put them on paper; but there they were, just across borderland,
and I saw them with my own eyes, and not as one usually sees them,
cramped by ugly gold mouldings at so much a foot.

There was one creature of extraordinary beauty--a goddess she must have
been--with tresses of molten gold; she had got into a big shell which I
had bought in Naples (they call it _terebra_), and, stretching herself
full length in it, she had fallen asleep. Then other shells I had left
behind in those stalls that line Santa Lucia came up from the deep, and
a little lithe-limbed urchin--I felt sure I had seen him
before--ensconced himself in one of them as in an arm-chair; and
next--such are dream