"Fifty pounds a year," answered the boy blushing. He had all the grand notions which are common to extreme youth, and was almost ashamed to proclaim the pitiful amount. "And very nice too," returned the stranger briskly; "I have known men whom fifty pounds a year--yes, or five-and-twenty--would have saved from ruin,--clever men who have starved for want of ten shillings a-week. A man with a pound a-week, secured to him for his lifetime, need never commit a dishonourable action, or accept an insult. Take me to see your aunt, Mr. Foley; and if I find her a sensible woman, we'll have you sitting behind your drawing-board at O'Skuro's Academy before the year is out." The elderly gentleman was as good as his word. He turned out to be an amateur landscape-painter, who united untiring industry to the smallest amount of ability, and who, with a very limited income, had contrived to collect a wonderful little gallery of what he called "bits," broker's-shop and obscure sale-room acquisitions, which adorned the walls of a tiny cottage at Dulwich, and which he was wont to exhibit every Sunday to admiring friends or sceptical connoisseurs. Before the year was out Miss Foley had consented to a bitter sacrifice, the sacrifice which she knew must come sooner or later, and had packed her boy's trunks, and stood on the platform at Burkesfield to watch the departure of the train that carried him away from her. Mr. Theophilus Gee, the amateur and connoisseur, had talked her into the belief that her nephew was an embryo Turner; and she had bidden the boy go forth upon the first stage on the great highway that leads to glory, or to disappointment and death. He left the simple elegance of his aunt's cottage, and the tutorship of the Burkesfield curate, to plunge into the universal Bohemia of art; and for four years he worked conscientiously under the fostering care or Mr. O'Skuro. Then came foreign travel, and then pedestrian wanderings on the wildest shores of England and Wales, Highland rambles, excursions in Western Ireland, a long apprenticeship to that grand mistress, Nature, who is a better teacher than all the masters who ever created academicians. And at last the young painter established himself in a lodging at Highbury, and began to paint for his daily bread. Then it was that his friend Mr. Gee introduced him to William Crawford, the great painter, who employed the embryo Turner to paint backgrounds for delicious little sketches that could have been covered half-a-dozen inches deep by the sovereigns that were given for them.