As the twilight gathered under the plane trees my vision became more mixed and morbid, and I hardly knew if the picture I saw was the picture in the Dulwich Gallery or the exquisite picture in the Louvre, "Une Assemblée dans la Parc." We all know that picture, the gallants and the ladies by the water-side, and the blue evening showing through the tall trees. The picture before me was like that picture, only the placing of the trees and the slope of the greensward did not admit of so extended a composition. A rough tree-trunk, from which a great branch had been broken or lopped off, stood out suddenly in very nineteenth-century naturalness, awaking the ghost of a picture which I recognised at once as Corot. Behind the tree a tender, evanescent sky, pure and transparent as the very heart of a flower, rose up, filling the park with romance, and as the sunset drooped upon the water, my soul said, "The Lake!" Ah, the pensive shadow that falls from the hills on either side of "The Lake," leaving the middle of the picture suffused with a long stream of light, narrowing as it approached the low horizon. But the line of the trees on the hither side of this London lake was heavier than the spiritual trees in the picture entitled "By the Water-side," and there was not anywhere the beauty of the broken birch that leans over the lake in "Le Lac de Garde." Then I thought of "The Ravine," for the darkening island reminded me of the hillside in the picture. But the St. James's Park sky lacked the refined concentration of light in "The Ravine," so beautifully placed, low down in the picture, behind some dark branches jutting from the right. The difference between Nature and Corot is as great as the difference between a true and a false Corot. Not that there is anything untrue in Nature, only Nature lacks humanity--self! Therefore not quite so interesting as a good Corot. So did I chatter to myself as I walked toward the bridge, that dear bridge, thrown straight as a plank across the lake, with numerous water-fowl collected there, a black swan driving the ducks about, snatching more than his due share of bread, and little children staring stolidly, afraid of the swan, and constantly reproved by their mothers for reasons which must always seem obscure to the bachelor. A little breeze was blowing, and the ducks bobbed like corks in the waves, keeping themselves in place with graceful side-strokes of their webbed feet. Sometimes the ducks rose from the water and flew round the trees by Queen Anne's Mansions, or they fled down the lake with outstretched necks like ducks on a Japanese fan, dropping at last into the water by the darkening island, leaving long silver lines, which the night instantly obliterated.