Memory is an artist who works in mosaic, and all the fantastic jumble and contrast of the experiences of travel she heaps pell-mell together in her bag. Bits of sights but half seen, but half understood; vague memories of other things seen before and seemingly but slightly related to these new impressions, mere faint associations but partly realised, along with keen emotions and strong pleasures; all tumbled in together and rubbing corners with petty vexations, small inconveniences, 179practical details. Memory gathers them all without discrimination and carries them along with her, a most unsatisfactory-looking mess at first sight, out of which it would seem nothing much could be made. But give her time. While one’s attention is occupied with other matters she is busy—sorting, arranging, rejecting here, adding there. Recollections that bulked large at first she often files down to a mere point; much that appeared but dull rubbish with no colour she finds valuable when pushed into the background, because its neutral tones serve to bring out more clearly the outlines of the design. Dark bits are skilfully employed for the sake of the contrast, and to intensify the warm tones of richer fragments. The shadowy associations give body and modelling to impressions otherwise flat and ineffective. All at once the picture is seen; a complete delineation of an episode, taking form and warmth, and vivid life; and over the whole she spreads the magic bloom of distance, which transforms the crude materials, hides the joinings of the mosaic, and makes of it a treasure of the soul. Something of this sort she did for Castrogiovanni. ’Tis but an impressionist picture. They only see, looking back to it, two great, divine shadows breathing such passion and pain, such essential, heart-stirring loveliness that the eye hardly observes the wreathed border about the picture, a border which serves merely as a frame for those two significant figures revived from the dreams of primitive man. Here is an incident taken from the unimportant frame of the picture.... Jane and Peripatetica are in the train. It seems 180quaint to be finding one’s way to the “Plutonian Shore” in a little puffing, racketting Sicilian train. To be properly in the picture they should have been included in a band of pilgrim shepherds piping in the hills as they wander upward to the great shrine of Demeter, to give thanks for the increase of their flocks, to offer her white curds, and goat cheeses, and the snowy wool of washed fleeces. Pilgrims who are weeks upon the road; climbing higher and higher each day through the steady sunshine, and sleeping at night under the large stars, with the little olive-wood fire, that cooked the evening meal, winking and smouldering beside them in the dewy darkness. Resting here and there at the Greek farms, where new pilgrims are waiting to add themselves to the pious band.