It is, I venture to think, a mistake on the part of some who depict country scenes on canvas that they omit these modern aspects, doubtless under the impression that to admit them would impair the pastoral scene intended to be conveyed. So many pictures and so many illustrations seem to proceed upon the assumption that steam-plough and reaping-machine do not exist, that the landscape contains nothing but what it did a hundred years ago. These sketches are often beautiful, but they lack the force of truth and reality. Every one who has been fifty miles into the country, if only by rail, knows while looking at them that they are not real. You feel that there is something wanting, you do not know what. That something is the hard, perhaps angular fact which at once makes the sky above it appear likewise a fact. Why omit fifty years from the picture? That is what it usually means--fifty years left out; and somehow we feel as we gaze that these fields and these skies are not of our day. The actual fields, the actual machines, the actual men and women (how differently dressed to the conventional pictorial costumes!) would prepare the mind to see and appreciate the colouring, the design, the beauty--what, for lack of a better expression, may be called the soul of the picture--far more than forgotten, and nowadays even impossible accessories. For our sympathy is not with them, but with the things of our own time. VILLAGE MINERS "Right so, the hunter takes his pony which has been trained for the purpose, and stalks the deer behind him; the pony feeds towards the herd, so that they do not mind his approach, and when within a hundred yards, the hunter kneels down in the grass and fixes his iron rest or fork in the ground. He rests his Winchester rifle in the fork, and aims under the pony (which stands quite still) at his game. He generally kills one dead at the first shot, and wounds two or three more, firing rapidly after the first discharge so as to get as many shots as possible before the herd is out of range." So writes a friend in the wilds of Texas, adding that the hides fetch a few dollars. "Right so, departed Sir Launcelot."... "Right so, Sir Launcelot, his father, dressed his spear."... "Right so, he heard a voice that said;"--so runs the phrase in the "Mort d'Arthur," that ancient history of the Round Table, which was published nearly four hundred years ago. The coincidence of phrase indicates some resemblance in the circumstances, though so wide apart in time and distance. In England, in those old days, men lived in the woods and forests--out-of-doors--and were occupied with manual works. They had no opportunities of polishing their discourse, or their literary compositions. At this hour, in remote parts of the great continent of America, the pioneers of modern civilisation may be said to live amid medieval surroundings. The vast forests and endless prairies give a romance to common things. Sometimes