"D'ye ken, John Peel at the break of day . . ." and felt like a fool. But he kept on at it, the only tune that he knew. It was the Yorkshire Light Infantry quick-step: the regiment of his brothers in India. He wished he had been in the army: but his father hadn't approved of having more than two younger sons in the army. He wondered if he would ever run with John Peel's hounds again: he had once or twice. Or with any of the trencher-fed foot packs of the Cleveland district, of which there had been still several when he had been a boy. He had been used to think of himself as being like John Peel with his coat so grey . . . Up through the heather, over Wharton's place; the pack running wild; the heather dripping; the mist rolling up . . . another kind of mist than this south country silver sheet. Silly stuff! Magical! That was the word. A silly word. . . . South country . . . In the north the old grey mists rolled together, revealing black hillsides! He didn't suppose he'd have the wind now: this rotten bureaucratic life! . . . If he had been in the army like the two brothers, Ernest and James, next above him . . . But no doubt he would not have liked the army. Discipline! . . . He supposed he would have put up with the discipline: a gentleman had to. Because _noblesse oblige_: not for fear of consequences . . . But army officers seemed to him pathetic. They spluttered and roared: to make men jump smartly: at the end of apoplectic efforts the men jumped smartly. But there was the end of it. . . . Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist . . . With the exact eye! It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; of orange: delicate reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts like snow. . . . The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work. The only work for a man. Why then, were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the school-teacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!