The lady was Mrs. Cobbold, and the two gentlemen were her friends, and both eminent artists in their day. One had already greatly distinguished himself as a portrait-painter, and vied with Sir Joshua Reynolds in his own particular school of painting: this was Gardiner, a distant relative of the lady. He was a singular old gentleman, in every way a talented original; his family groups, in half crayon, half water-colour, gained general admiration; and to this day they stand the test of years, never losing their peculiar freshness, and remain as spirited as on the first day they were painted. The other was indeed but a boy, a fine intelligent lad, with handsome, open countenance, beaming with all the ardour of a young aspirant for fame: this was John Constable, who was then sketching the town of Ipswich from the Cliff, and brushing in the tints of the setting sun, and receiving those early praises from the lips of that benevolent and talented lady which became a stimulus to his exertions, before he was raised to the eminence of a first-rate landscape-painter. Gardiner delighted in the buoyant group of children, who, with their flapping fish, came bounding up the Cliff. "Look here! look here! see what old Robin has given us." The artist's eyes dilated with glee as he quickly noted down their jocund faces and merry antics for some future painting. If he had experienced pleasure in the character of James, Thomas, George, Elizabeth Ann, and Mary, what a fine master-figure was now added to the group in the person of old Robin, the fisherman, who, with his basket of mackerel and soles, stood behind the children in front of the happy party! Gardiner's picture of the "Fisherman's Family" was taken from this group, and it was one which in his mature years gained him much celebrity. "Well, Robin, what fish have you got?" said the lady, "and how do the witches treat you?" "As to the first, madam, here are mackerel and soles; as to the latter, they treat me scurvily!" "What's that? what's that?" said Gardiner; "what's all that about the witches?" Old Colson looked at him a minute, and partly believed he was a brother sufferer; for Gardiner never was what the world has since denominated a dandy, he was never even a beau; he was careless in his dress, and very abrupt in his address,--extremely clever and extremely eccentric. "Why, this is it," said the old fisherman, "if the foul fiend treats you as he does me, he makes us both such hideous objects that nobody can bear to look at us." There was no little colour in the artist's face at this moment: he had met with a light and shade, an odd mixture upon his palette not easily defined, and he looked himself rather vacant upon the fisherman. "I see how it is," said Robin; "they have been at work upon you, and have put your robes out of order; but give them a blast of this ram's horn, and you will soon get rid of them." Here the old man presented a ram's horn to the astonished artist.