Mr. Bowie was the art-critic of a great daily journal. In early life he had courted art himself; but lacking executive power, he had mixed up a few theories and quaint conceits which he had learned with a great deal of acrid bile, with which he had been gifted by nature, and wrote the most pungent and malevolent art-notices of the day. A tall, light-haired, vacant-looking man, like a light-house without any light in it, peering uncomfortably over his stiff white cravat, and fumbling nervously at his watch-chain. Clinging close to him, and pointing out to him various pictures as they passed them by, was quite another style of man,--Caniche, the great picture dealer,--an under-sized lively Gascon, black-bearded from his chin, round which it was closely cut, to his beady black eyes, faultlessly dressed, sparkling in speech, affable in manner, at home with all. "Ah, ah!" said he, stopping before the easel, "the Via Mala! Not bad--not at all bad!" he continued, with scarcely a trace of a foreign accent. "Yours, Charley Potts? yours, _mon brave?_ De-caidedly an improvement, Charley! You go on that way, mai boy, and some day--" "Some day you'll give me twenty pound, and sell me for a hundred! won't you, Caniche?--generous buffalo!" growled Charley, over his pipe. The men round laughed, but Caniche was not a bit offended. "Of course," he said, simply, "I will, indeed; that is my trade! And if you could find a man who would give you thirty, you would throw me over in what you call a brace of shakes! _N'est-ce pas?_ Meanwhile, find the man to give you thirty. He is not here; I mean coming now.--How do you do, Herr Stompff?" Mr. Caniche (popularly known as Cannish among the artists) winced as he said this, for Herr Stompff was his great rival and bitterest enemy. A short, bald-headed, gray-bearded man was Mr. Stompff,--a Hamburger,--who, on his first arrival in England, had been an importer of piping bullfinches at Hull; then a tobacconist in St Mary Axe; and who finally had taken up picture-selling, and did an enormous business. No one could tell that he was not an Englishman from his talk, and an Englishman with a marvellous fluency in the vernacular. He had every slang saying as soon as it was out, and by this used to triumph over his rival Caniche, who never could follow his phraseology. "Hallo, Caniche!" he said; "how are you? What's up?--running the rig on the boys here! telling Charley Potts his daubs are first-rate? Pickles!--We know all that game, don't we, Charley? What do you want for it, Charley?--How are you, Mr. Bowie? what's fresh with you, sir? Too proud to come and have a cut of mutton with me and Mrs. S. a-Sunday, I suppose? Some good fellows coming, too; Mugger from the Cracksideum, and Talboys and Sir Paul Potter--leastways I've asked him. Well, Charley, what's the figure for this lot, eh?"