its
teeth, or mouth, or eyes, or whatever you do examine when you go poking
around in front of it.

Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom--evidently
Knight's--full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels
lining the walls; and then into another--evidently the guest's room--all
lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old
portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn,
grumbling, "Just like him to try and fool us," but no trace of Knight.

Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus
bringing clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of
willows shading the rushing stream below.

"Louis! _Louis!_ Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?"

There came an halloo--faint--downstream.

"The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get
him out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!"

There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an
uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself
barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a
crowded bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta,
where I used the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when
years ago, I clung to the platform of an elevated station in an effort
to get, between the legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines
of the spider-web connecting the two cities. I have watched, too,
other painters in equally uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door
painters; not steam-heated, easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda
or photos to copy from) but it was the first time in all my varied
experiences that I had ever come upon a painter standing up to his
armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other kind of stream, the water
breaking against his body as a rock breasts a torrent, and he working
away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder high enough to scale
the mill's roof.

"Any fish?" yelled the Man from the Quarter.

"Yes, one squirming around my knees now--shipped him a minute ago--foot
slipped. Awful glad to see you--stay where you are till I get this high
light."

"Stay where I am!" bellowed the Sculptor. "Do you think I'm St. Peter or
some long-legged crane that--"

"All right--I'm coming."

He had grabbed both sides of the ladder by this time, and with head in
the _crotch_ was sloshing ashore, the water squir