“‘It was painted when you were a young man, four years before you were an associate, Smee. Had some success in its time, and there’s good pints about that picture,’ Gandish goes on. ‘But I never could get my price for it; and here it hangs in my own room. Igh art won’t do in this country, Colonel—it’s a melancholy fact.’ “‘High art! I should think it _is_ high art!’ whispers old Smee; ‘fourteen feet high, at least!’ And then out loud he says ‘The picture has very fine points in it, Gandish, as you say. Foreshortening of that arm, capital! That red drapery carried off into the right of the picture very skilfully managed!’ “‘It’s not like portrait-painting, Smee—Igh art,’ says Gandish. ‘The models of the hancient Britons in that pictur alone cost me thirty pound—when I was a struggling man, and had just married my Betsey here. You reckonise Boadishia, Colonel, with the Roman elmet, cuirass, and javeling of the period—all studied from the hantique, sir, the glorious hantique.’ “‘All but Boadicea,’ says father. ‘She remains always young.’ And he began to speak the lines out of Cowper, he did—waving his stick like an old trump—and famous they are,” cries the lad: “When the British warrior queen, Bleeding from the Roman rods”— “Jolly verses! Haven’t I translated them into alcaics?” says Clive, with a merry laugh, and resumes his history. “‘Oh, I must have those verses in my album,’ cries one of the young ladies. ‘Did you compose them, Colonel Newcome?’ But Gandish, you see, is never thinking about any works but his own, and goes on, ‘Study of my eldest daughter, exhibited 1816.’ “‘No, pa, not ’16,’ cries Miss Gandish. She don’t look like a chicken, I can tell you. “‘Admired,’ Gandish goes on, never heeding her,—‘I can show you what the papers said of it at the time—_Morning Chronicle_ and _Examiner_—spoke most ighly of it. My son as an infant ’Ercules, stranglin the serpent over the piano. Fust conception of my picture of “Non Hangli said Hangeli.”’ “‘For which I can guess who were the angels that sat,’ says father. Upon my word, that old governor! He is a little too strong. But Mr. Gandish listened no more to him than to Mr. Smee, and went on, buttering himself all over, as I have read the Hottentots do. ‘Myself at thirty-three years of age!’ says he, pointing to a portrait of a gentleman in leather breeches and mahogany boots; ‘I could have been a portrait-painter, Mr. Smee.’ “‘Indeed it was lucky for some of us you devoted yourself to high art, Gandish,’ Mr. Smee says, and sips the wine and puts it down again, making a face. It was not first-rate tipple, you see.