The picture still hangs over the chimney-shelf in the library at Surley Stakes, and you may see it any time if you are in the neighbourhood. Mr. Stebbings will show it to you, and give you an abstract of the _cinquecento_ in Italy. But he sometimes is a little obscure; so our recommendation to you is, to ask for Mrs. Buckmaster, who can never tire of talking about it, and who will strike you as being the living image of Mrs. Rouncewell in "Bleak House." Make her talk freely, and she will tell you how whenever "our young lady," otherwise Lady Calverley--for our friend Jack unexpectedly came to the inheritance of Granchester Towers two years since--visits the Stakes she always goes straight to the picture and looks at it before anything else. And how she tells little Madeline, her eldest girl, who is old enough to understand, that pictures can really see and hear; and, indeed, has told her the story of the picture long ago. Of which the crown and summit of delight to this little maid of four seems to have been its richness in murder. Chiefest of all, the impalement of the old Raimondi on Marta's knife. You will gather that requests are made for a recital of this part of the story at untimely moments--coming home from church on Sunday, and so on. She is going to tell it to Baby herself as soon as he is old enough. But he isn't one yet; he has to be reckoned in months. To think of the joys there are before him! Mrs. Buckmaster will tell you too--if you work her up enough--of the Dutch girl, and the miles of veldt Sir John bought and gave her as a wedding present. But to get at all this you must first get her out of the library, for while she is there she can talk of little but the picture. "I always _do_ have the thought," she will very likely say, as she has said it to us, "that the picture can as good as hear us speak, for all the world as if it was a Christian, and not an inanimate object. Because its eyes keep looking--looking. Like reading into your mind, whatever Mr. Stebbings may say! We must all think otherwise, now and again, and Mr. Stebbings's qualifications as a butler none can doubt." Mrs. Buckmaster will then tell you of the three different Artists three separate eminent critics have ascribed it to. But there can be no doubt that the family incline to Boldrini, on the strength of Mr. Pelly's dream. To be sure, no such artist is known to have existed. But is not the same true of the _nipote del fratello di latte del Bronzino_, whom the Coryphæus of these Art Critics invented to father it on?