Upon this I made her fetch her sketch-book, after promising 'not to tell mamma,' who might well be forgiven for a prejudice against any more members of her family sacrificing themselves to this Juggernaut. The sketches were all of fir and larch-tree, hillside and rippling stony Dee; some were in pencil, some in water-colour; there was love in every line of each of the little pictures, and there was something more. 'Why, Babiole, you're going to be a great artist, I believe,' I cried, as I noticed the vigour of the outlines, the imaginative charm of the treatment of her favourite corners of rock and forest. 'Oh no, not that,' she said deprecatingly. 'If I can be only a little one I shall be satisfied. I should never dare to draw the big hills. When I get on those hills along the Gairn and see the peaks rising the one behind the other all round me, I feel almost as if I ought to fall on my knees only to look at them; it is only when we have crept down into some cleft full of trees, where I can peep at them from round a corner, that I feel I can take out my paper and my paint-box without disrespect.' 'But you can be a great artist without painting great things. You may paint Snowdon so that it is nothing better than a drawing-master's copy, and you may paint a handful of wild flowers so that it may shame acres of classical pot-boilers hung on the line at the Royal Academy.' Babiole was thoughtfully silent for some minutes after this, while I turned over the rest of her drawings. 'Drawing-master's copy!' she repeated slowly at last. 'Then a drawing-master is a man who doesn't draw very well, or who isn't very particular how he teaches what he knows?' 'Yes, without being very severe I think we may say that.' 'That is not like your teaching, Mr. Maude.' 'What do you mean?' 'Why, all these months that you've been away I've had a lot of time to think, and I see what a different thing you have made of life to me by teaching me to understand things. Last year I thought of nothing when I was out on the hills with Ta-ta but childish things--stories and things like that. And now all the while I think of the things that are going on in the great world, the pictures that are being painted, the books that are being written.' 'And the dresses that are being worn?' I suggested playfully, not at all sure that the change she was so proud of was entirely for the better. 'Well, yes, I think I should like to know that too,' she admitted, with a blush. 'And you want to attribute all that to my teaching?' 'Yes, Mr. Maude,' she answered, laughing; 'you must bear the blame of it all.'