“Burlington House, pah!” he would say, half-shutting one eye as he held up in the middle distance a glistening sausage, crackling from the pan. “It is the Mausoleum of Art, my dear.” “Mausoleum?” inquired Ginger, biting off her thread, because she was neatening a loose end of braid on the Pavement Artist’s shabby brown cotton velveteen jacket. She often did such jobs for her friends at midnight. “I think it’s the name of a music-hall,” whispered Gypsy. “Of a dancing-hall,” corrected the Pavement Artist, “where they do the Dance of Death to the skeleton rattle of easels and mahlsticks. Vampires sit at the door waiting to suck the red blood from the veins of any living artist who ventures in. Once in he seldom, if ever, gets out again. I thought it wasn’t worth it, and I took to the art of the populace on the pavements.” “Do the populace like art?” asked Gypsy. “They like mine,” said the P.A. “I paint their dreams for them.” “What are their dreams?” asked Ginger. “Salmon and Switzerland,” said the P.A. His eyes grew hazy. “They are also mine. Have you ever eaten salmon?” He attacked Gypsy abruptly. “Twice,” said Gypsy, suppressing a hundredth part of the truth out of kindness of heart. “Ah. So have I--tinned. And have you ever seen Switzerland?” Ginger nodded. “She’s seen everywhere,” explained Gypsy apologetically. “So have I--in Oxford Street. It was years and years ago. You sat in a pretend railway carriage for twopence, and the floor rocked, and a man turned a handle to make the sound of wheels, and another one yodelled while a panorama of mountains and waterfalls whirled past the carriage window.” The Pavement Artist’s chin sank on his breast. “But I know,” he whispered, “that it’s not like that really, neither the salmon nor the mountains. They are not even like my pictures of them.” “What are they like?” asked Ginger, filling his teacup. “They are like my dreams of them,” said the P.A., “they are like what I feel when I do the pictures. And I only do the best parts. I do middle cuts of Scotch. I know the loch my salmon was caught in, I know the thrill of the angler as he hooks, plays, and lands it, yes, and the thrill of the fish. I have seen it come down in spate----” “What’s spate?” said Ginger. There were lots of words she didn’t know. “Sh!” said Gypsy putting his finger on her mouth, for the P.A. was wandering in a world apart. “Sometimes,” he murmured, “I do it raw, sometimes cooked. When it is raw the blue and silver scales of the skin are more exquisite; but when it is cooked there are thin slices of cucumber with seeds visible in their cool transparent centres. Have you ever felt the beauty of design in the heart of a cucumber?--Once I surrounded the king of fish with a thick layer of mayonnaise.” His nostrils inflated slightly. “And Switzerland!” “Yes, Switzerland?” repeated Ginger softly. His way of saying it diffused glamour over a country which on the whole had bored her.