In those days we used to sketch at Knole House, then in the possession of Lord and Lady Delaware. My mother made some very beautiful little pictures of the interiors there, and several smaller studies. She copied a Teniers so perfectly that one could have mistaken it for the original. The painting was supposed to represent "Peter and the Angels in the Guard Room," and the guards were very conspicuous. On the other hand, as one only discovered a little angel with Peter in the distance, one could almost suppose Teniers had forgotten them until the last minute, and then had finally decided to relegate them to the background. This picture (the original) was sold at Christie's during a sale from Knole several years ago. Of course the old house was the happy hunting ground of artists; the pictures were mostly fine although some of them were at one time in the hands of a cleaner, by whom they were very much over-restored. A clever artist (and a frequenter of Knole at that time for the purpose of making a series of studies) was Claude Calthrop (brother of Clayton Calthrop the actor and father of the present artist and writer Dion Clayton Calthrop). I was then just beginning to be encouraged to make architectural drawings, and I was making a sketch of the exterior of Knole House when one of the under gardeners came ambling by wheeling a barrow. He paused ... put down the barrow, took off his cap ... scratched his head and said to me, "Er ... why waaste yer toime loike that ... why not taake and worrk loike Oi dew!" Another time when I was sketching in that neighbourhood, in rather a lonely part, I fell in with a gipsy encampment. One of the tribe, a rough specimen, of whom I did not at all like the look, was most persistently attentive. He asked a multitude of questions, about my brushes, paints, and materials generally--and seemed anxious as to their monetary value. As he did not appear to be about to cut my throat--and I felt sure he harboured no murderous intentions towards my painting--I began to feel more at ease, and when no comments after the style of my critic, the gardener, were forthcoming, it struck me that perhaps I had a vagrant but fellow beauty-lover in my gipsy sentinel. I wish now that I had even suggested (in view of his evident love of colour) his changing his roving career for one in which he could indulge his love of _red_ to the utmost and more or less harmlessly.