Interesting not only as the earliest example here of Mrs. Allingham's landscape work, having been painted at Limpsfield, Surrey, in May 1876, and as such full of promise of better things to come, but as an instance of a preference for a complex and very difficult effect, which the artist, on obtaining greater experience, very wisely abandoned. There is little doubt that she was tempted by the glorious wealth of colouring which a low sun threw upon the warm quarry side, the pine wood, and the huge cumuli which banked them up--a magnificent but a fleeting effect, which could only be placed on record from very rapid notes. The result could be successful only in the hands of a practised adept, and it is not surprising, therefore, that in those of an artist just embarking on her career it was not entirely so. The difficulties of the task may have afforded her a useful lesson, for we have seen no further attempts on her part at their repetition. If the landscape foretells little concerning the future of the artist, the figures standing on the brink of the quarry, the elder with her arm placed lovingly and protectingly round the neck of the younger, whilst they watch the martins rejoicing in the warm summer evening, are eminently suggestive of the success which Mrs. Allingham was to achieve in the addition of figures to landscape composition. [Illustration: 10. THE OLD MEN'S GARDENS, CHELSEA HOSPITAL _From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Charles Churchill._ Painted 1876.] Contemporary criticism is not, as a rule, palatable to an artist, for amongst the varied views which the art critics bring to their task there are always to be found some that are not seen from the same standpoint as his. Besides, for some occult reason, the balance always trends in the direction of fault-finding rather than praise, probably because it is so much the easier, for work always has and will have imperfections that are not difficult to distinguish. But in the case of the water-colour before us the critics' chorus must have been very exhilarating to the young artist, especially as, at the time of its exhibition at the Royal Water-Colour Society, in the spring of 1877, she was by no means in good health. The _Spectator_, for instance, wrote that artists would have to look to their laurels when ladies began to paint in a manner little inferior to Walker. The _Athenæum_ gave it the exceptional length of a column, considering it "one of the few pictures by which the exhibition in question would be remembered." Tom Taylor in the _Times_ wrote as follows:--