He was a bright, intelligent, indolent, inaccurate lad, utterly incapable of dates or facts in general, but full of social qualities,--good-natured, tender-hearted, ready to do anything for anybody. And then he had travelled a little, and drifted among an artist set, and from that day hoped and imagined himself capable of art. He had always had a certain facility in drawing, and everybody knows how easy it is to glide into the busy dawdling, the thousand pleasant trifles of occupation which fill the time of an amateur. It seemed to Laurie, as it has seemed to many another, that a life made beautiful by that faculty of discovering beauty which the humblest artist prides himself on possessing,--and the privilege of claiming a kind of membership with a noble craft,--was superior to the loftiest stool and the most dignified desk even in a Foreign Office. He was proud to call himself, as he often did, ‘a poor painter;’ and, alas! a poor painter in the literal sense of the words Laurie was. He had no genius, poor fellow! only a tender, amiable, pleasant, little talent, which would have led him into verses had his turn been literary. His friends and relations would have been more deeply shocked still had they known what a toss-up it was whether Laurie’s amateurship had taken the literary or artistic turn,--but fortunately it was the latter; and as he made pretty little sketches, and had given them away with charming liberality, and harmed nobody, it was only the high moralists, such as his Aunt Lydia, who found any fault with what he was fond of calling his ‘trade.’ And there was this to be said in his favour, that he had no expensive tastes, and that, given this mode of idleness, which he called work, Laurie’s was about as harmless a life as a young man could lead;--‘especially as he will never need to maintain himself,’ people had been used to say.