Early on a fine summer morning, an old man was walking on the road between Brussels and Namur. He expected a friend to arrive by the diligence, and he set out some time before it was due, to meet it on the road. Having a good deal of time to spare, he amused himself by watching any object of interest that caught his eye; and at length stopped to inspect the operations of a painter, who, mounted on a ladder placed against the front of a wayside inn, was busily employed in depicting a sign suitable to its name, “The Rising Sun.” “Here,” said the old man to himself, “is an honest dauber, who knows as much of perspective as a cart-horse; and who, I’ll warrant, fancies himself a Rubens. How he brushes in that ultramarine sky!” The critic then commenced walking backward and forward before the inn, thinking that he might as well loiter there for the diligence as walk on farther. The painter, meantime, continued to lay on fresh coats of the brightest blue, which appeared to aggravate the old gentleman very much. At length, when the sign-painter took another brush full of blue paint to plaster on, the spectator could endure it no longer, and exclaimed severely— “Too much blue!” The honest painter looked down from his perch, and said, in that tone of forced calmness which an angry man sometimes assumes: “Monsieur does not perceive that I am painting a sky?” “Oh, yes, I see very well, you are trying to paint a sky, but I tell you again there is too much blue.” “Did you ever see skies painted without blue, Master amateur?” “I am not an amateur. I merely tell you, in passing—I make the casual remark—that that there is too much blue; but do as you like. Put more blue, if you don’t think you have troweled on enough already.” “But I tell you, that I want to represent a clear, blue sky at sunrise.” “And I tell you that no man in his senses would make a sky at sunrise blue.” “By St. Gudula, this is too much!” exclaimed the painter, coming down from his ladder, at no pains this time to conceal his anger; “I should like to see how _you_ would paint skies without blue.” “I don’t pretend to much skill in sky-painting; but, if I were to make a trial, I wouldn’t put in too much blue.” “And what would it look like if you didn’t?” “Like nature, I hope, and not like yours, which might be taken for a bed of gentianella, or a sample of English cloth, or any thing you please—except a sky; I beg to assure you, for the tenth time, there is too much blue!” “I tell you what, old gentleman,” cried the insulted artist, crossing his maul-stick over his shoulder, and looking very fierce, “I dare say you are a very worthy fellow when you are at home; but you should not be let out—alone.” “Why not?”