y mountains and penetrate the weedy valleys, and glide
across the slippery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniacke, I drowned little
Jack--I drowned him in the sea, I drowned him in the sea."

The painter spoke the last words in a voice of profound, even of morbid,
melancholy, as if he were indeed confessing a secret crime, driven by
some wayward and irresistible impulse. Uniacke looked at him in growing
surprise.

"And why not?" Uniacke asked.

But the painter did not reply. He continued:

"I made him see the rainbows of the sea and he looked no more at the
rainbows of the sky. For at length I had his imagination fast in my net
as a salmon that fishermen entice within the stakes. His town mind
seemed to fade under my fostering, and, Uniacke, 'nothing of him that
did fade but did suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.'"

The painter got up from his chair and walked over to the blowing wind
that crept in at the window fastenings. The red curtains flew out
towards him. He pushed them back with his hands.

"Into something rich and strange," he repeated, as if to himself. "And
strange."

"Ah, but that was said, surely, of one who was actually drowned in the
sea," said the clergyman. "It might be suitably placed on many of the
memorial slabs in the church yonder," he continued, waving his hand
towards the casement that looked on the churchyard. "But your
sea-urchin--"

"Oh, I speak only of the fading of the town nature into the sea nature,"
rejoined the painter quickly, "only of that. The soil of the childish
mind was enriched; his eyes shone as if touched with a glow from the
sun, swaying in the blue sea. The Trafalgar Square gamin disappeared,
and at last my sea-urchin stood before me. As the little Raleigh may
have looked he looked at me, and I saw in the face then rather the
wonder of the sea itself than the crude dancing desire of the little
adventurer who would sail it. And it was the wonder of the sea embodied
in a child that I desired to paint, not the wakening of a human spirit
of gay seamanship and love of peril. That's for a Christmas number--but
that came at last."

He stopped abruptly and faced the clergyman.

"Why does the second best succeed so often and so closely the best, I
wonder," he said. "It is very often so in the art life of a man, even of
a great man. And it is so sometimes--perhaps you know this better than
I--in the soul life of a nature. Must we always sink again after we have
so