Trist's second ambition (the first being never to be unprepared) is to own the best Old Crome. His life may be said almost to have been dedicated to Old Crome. He has three on his walls, and he wants others, but they must be better than the three; which to my eye are perfect. Two are views of Household Heath, which stood for the promised land to this painter, and the other is a cottage and a tree and a peasant woman. They are the only pictures in the room. In the dining-room one painter again is represented, and one only, the rare and marvellous Bonington, who perished in his pride, but not before he had revolutionised French landscape painting,--all water-colours. Trist spends hours every week in curiosity shops, and in the summer, when he is driven from London by sheer lack of activity there, he makes his holiday in Norfolk, partly sailing on the Broads and partly bicycling among the farmhouses, into which with masterly address he finds his way and scans the walls for the Master's glow. His manners are charming, and he rarely meets with a rebuff. Down to the present time, however, he tells me, one Crome and one only has he found that he covets--and that he cannot get. The owner, a strong wealthy farmer of as much independence and will-power as Trist himself, would as soon sell his daughter. Nothing else moves Trist to feeling. Old Crome and Bonington can light his eye, but for the rest his attitude through life is one of cool, amused detachment and perfect self-possession. I have from time to time set down his _obiter dicta_ on the management of one's affairs in a very civilised progress through this vale of tears; but as I can remember only those that he has dropped in my hearing, the record necessarily is deprived of thousands that may be better,--as indeed I suppose Boswell's also is. (A new collection of Johnson's good things uttered when Boswell was absent would stand almost first among the books we desire. I mentioned this to Mr. Bemerton one day, for we often talk of the impossible books we should like to have. "Yes," he said, "and what a good subject for the forger." He is, by the way, greatly interested in literary forgeries, and keeps a number of them together on a shelf, and is one of the few people who have read _Vortigern_.) Here, then, are certain of the aphorisms with which Trist would, in his Chesterfieldian manner, instruct his son, if he had anything so ridiculous. All begin with the same words--concerning which I might perhaps say that by "life" Trist does not mean what a poet means, or a saint, or a schoolboy, or a motorist, or even what I mean by it. Trist means by "life" a protected ease. I have jotted them down from time to time as I remembered them--my first thought being mischievously to convict him of inconsistency. I see now, however, that one definite idea connects all.