two he would be tingling for wider things again and chafing at the slow passage of ungrudged hours. Like all healthily minded young men, he knew he was going to overtop the world, and the air here was opiate. But for the moment he was in love with tranquility. Both his father and mother were out when he arrived at the house, and, with the spell of soothing still on him, he sauntered off again, meaning to return home for tea, and leaving the town, struck into a foot-path that led through the water-meadows by the river. It has been stated how his mother regretted that, if he was to be a painter at all, he had not been a landscape-painter, and this afternoon the regret was his also. Portrait-painting, he told himself, was an inspiration which might or might not be at one’s command. For every hundred faces he looked at he only saw one or two that suggested anything. Before now he had caused offence, when given an order for a portrait, by insisting on seeing his sitter before he promised anything, and then declining the task. It was not beauty he looked for in a face, nor was it exactly intelligence. The quality, whatever it was, might be altogether absent in the most admired features, and present in every line of the face when there were, so to speak, no features at all. It was this eternal search for this, the refusal to paint where he did not find it, and a magical brush when he did, that had already given him a somewhat unusual standing among the younger painters of the day. His pictures were few, but, as a natural consequence of the integrity and honesty of his art, his refusal to paint without the conviction that his subject was for him, there was nothing in any of them to show a want of grasp. That everything was proper material for art he did not deny, but he emphatically affirmed that everything was not proper material for each artist. But, compared to the portrait-painter who thus limited himself, how fortunate, he thought, was the landscape-painter. All trees were paintable if you could paint a tree at all; all clear and running water was beautiful, all clouds “composed.” This green bank on which he wandered, the lower grasses of which waved in the suck of the brilliant stream, the stretch of meadow beyond, tall with loose-strife and the hundred herbs of watery places, the great austern downs beyond with the clump or two of pines, the remnants of the great southern forests of England--what landscape-painter could fail to find his subject in any of these?