emia Baines, by her most obliged, most obedient servant,
Ferdinando Blitz. Baines hopes that his young friend will come
constantly to York Terrace, where the most girls will be happy to see
him; and mentions at home a singular whim of Colonel Newcome's, who can
give his son twelve or fifteen hundred a year, and makes an artist of
him. Euphemia and Flora adore artists; they feel quite interested
about this young man. "He was scribbling caricatures all the time I was
talking with his father in my parlour," says Mr. Baines, and produces
a sketch of an orange-woman near the Bank, who had struck Clive's eyes,
and been transferred to the blotting-paper in Fog Court. "He needn't do
anything," said good-natured Mr. Baines. "I guess all the pictures he'll
paint won't sell for much."

"Is he fond of music, papa?" asks Miss. "What a pity he had not come to
our last evening; and now the season is over!"

"And Mr. Newcome is going out of town. He came to me, to-day
for circular notes--says he's going through Switzerland and into
Italy--lives in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Queer place, ain't it?
Put his name down in your book, and ask him to dinner next season."

Before Clive went away, he had an apparatus of easels, sketching-stools,
umbrellas, and painting-boxes, the most elaborate and beautiful that
Messrs. Soap and Isaac could supply. It made J. J.'s eyes glisten to
see those lovely gimcracks of art; those smooth mill-boards, those
slab-tinted sketching-blocks, and glistening rows of colour-tubes
lying in their boxes, which seemed to cry, "Come, squeeze me." If
painting-boxes made painters, if sketching-stools would but enable one
to sketch, surely I would hasten this very instant to Messrs. Soap and
Isaac! but, alas! these pretty toys no more make artists than cowls make
monks.

As a proof that Clive did intend to practise his profession, and to live
by it too, at this time he took four sporting sketches to a printseller
in the Haymarket, and disposed of them at the rate of seven shillings
and sixpence per sketch. His exultation at receiving a sovereign and
half a sovereign from Mr. Jones was boundless. "I can do half a dozen of
these things easily in a morning," he says. "Two guineas a day is twelve
guineas--say ten guineas a week, for I won't work on Sundays, and may
take a holiday in the week besides. Ten guineas a week is five hundred
a year. That is pretty nearly as much money as I shall want, and I need
not draw