d will be uttered in the most polite families. They came to a
piece by Mr. Hunt, representing one of those figures which he knows how
to paint with such consummate truth and pathos--a friendless young girl
cowering in a doorway, evidently without home or shelter. The exquisite
fidelity of the details, and the plaintive beauty of the expression of
the child, attracted old Lady Kew's admiration, who was an excellent
judge of works of art; and she stood for some time looking at the
drawing, with Ethel by her side. Nothing, in truth, could be more simple
or pathetic; Ethel laughed, and her grandmother looking up from her
stick on which she hobbled about, saw a very sarcastic expression in the
girl's eyes.

"You have no taste for pictures, only for painters, I suppose," said
Lady Kew.

"I was not looking at the picture," said Ethel, still with a smile, "but
at the little green ticket in the corner."

"Sold," said Lady Kew. "Of course it is sold; all Mr. Hunt's pictures
are sold. There is not one of them here on which you won't see the green
ticket. He is a most admirable artist. I don't know whether his comedy
or tragedy are the most excellent."

"I think, grandmamma," Ethel said, "we young ladies in the world, when
we are exhibiting, ought to have little green tickets pinned on our
backs, with 'Sold' written on them; it would prevent trouble and any
future haggling, you know. Then at the end of the season the owner would
come to carry us home."

Grandmamma only said, "Ethel, you are a fool," and hobbled on to Mr.
Cattermole's picture hard by. "What splendid colour; what a romantic
gloom; what a flowing pencil and dexterous hand!" Lady Kew could delight
in pictures, applaud good poetry, and squeeze out a tear over a good
novel too. That afternoon, young Dawkins, the rising water-colour
artist, who used to come daily to the gallery and stand delighted before
his own piece, was aghast to perceive that there was no green ticket in
the corner of his frame, and he pointed out the deficiency to the keeper
of the pictures. His landscape, however, was sold and paid for, so no
great mischief occurred. On that same evening, when the Newcome family
assembled at dinner in Park Lane, Ethel appeared with a bright green
ticket pinned in the front of her white muslin frock, and when asked
what this queer fancy meant, she made Lady Kew a curtsey, looking
her full in the face, and turning round to her father, said, "I am a
tableau-vivan