It must not be forgotten that the name of Frederick Walker was at this time in every one's mouth, that is, every one who could be deemed to be included in the small Art world of those days. The painter visitors to the Academy schools sang his praises to the students, and he himself fascinated and charmed them with his boyish and graceful presence. As Mrs. Allingham says, everybody in the schools "adored" him and his work, and on the opening of the Academy doors on the first Monday in May the students rushed to his picture first of all. To contradict a dictum of Walker's in those days was the rankest heresy in a student. Mrs. Allingham remembers an occasion when a painter was holding forth on the right methods of water-colour work, asserting that the paper should be put flat down on a table, as was the custom with the old men, and the colour should be laid on in washes and left to dry with edges, and if Walker taught any other method he was wrong. Mrs. Allingham and her fellow-students were furious at their hero being possibly in fault, and asked for the opinion of an Academician. His reply was: "And _who_ is Mr. ----, and how does _he_ paint that _he_ should lay down the law? If Walker _is_ all wrong with his methods, he paints like an angel." Mrs. Allingham's confession of faith is this: "I _was_ influenced, doubtless, by his work. I adored it, but I never consciously copied it. It revealed to me certain beauties and aspects of Nature, as du Maurier's had done, and as North's and others have since done, and then I saw like things for myself in Nature, and painted them, I truly think, in my own way--not the best way, I dare say, but in the only way _I_ could." Those, therefore, who discover not the reflection but the inspiration of Walker in the idyllic grace of Mrs. Allingham's figures, and in her treatment of flowers, place her in a company which she readily accepts, and is proud of. But it is with Birket Foster that our artist's name has been more intimately linked by the critics, some even going to the length of asserting that without him there would have been no Mrs. Allingham. Having had the pleasure of an intimacy with Birket Foster, which extended to writing his biography (_Birket Foster: His Life and Work_, Virtue and Co., 1890), I can emphatically assert that he never held that opinion, but stated that she had struck out a line which was entirely her own, and, as he generously added, "with much more modernity in it than mine." There are, however, so many similarities between their artistic careers that I may be excused for dwelling on some of them, for they no doubt unconsciously influenced not only the method of their work but the subject of it. Drawing in black and white on wood in each case formed the groundwork of their education, and was only followed by colour at a subsequent stage.