"He has succeeded in getting a pictorial effort hung at a public exhibition in Plymouth," said Mr. Churchward. "They are holding a picture show there--all West Country artists; and I confess I am gratified to hear that William has been chosen. I think of taking Mary down to see it presently. Perhaps, if we selected the market-day, you would join us, Mrs. Weekes?" "Likely!" she answered. "Me trapsing about looking at pictures, and my stall----there, you men! Guy Fawkes and good angels! And you go about saying you've got all the sense! I could wish your son might find something better to do, I'm sure, for there's no money to it, and never will be." "The art of photography will be a serious stroke to the painters of pictures, no doubt," admitted Mr. Churchward. "Yet such things have not the colours of nature which the artist's brush produces--nor have they the life." "As to life," she answered, "there's a proper painted picture down to Plymouth in a shop near the market--the best picture as ever I see in all my days. Two mice gnawing a bit of Stilton cheese. Life! Why, _'tis_ life. You can pretty near smell the cheese. And only two pound ten, for the ticket's on it. If you want life, there you are; but it have been in that window a year to my certain knowledge. Nobody wants it, and nobody wants your son's daubs. He'd much better give over and burn all his trash." "He can't, my dear woman. 'Tis in his blood--he must be painting, like I must be teaching and you must be selling. We're built on a pattern, Mrs. Weekes, and that pattern we must work out against all odds. William is a _lusus naturæ_ as one may say--a freak of nature." "I'm sorry for you," answered she. "There's nought to be proud of, anyhow. Where's the cleverness in fashioning things that ban't worth more in open market than the dirt pies the childer make in the road? Better paint houses, and get paid, than paint pictures and get nought." "'Tis a most curious thing that such a huge man as the 'Infant' do always paint such little pickshers," said Mr. Huggins. "Why--them things what Noah Pearn have got hanging up in the bar parlour ban't bigger than a sheet of writing paper. Yet, from the tremendous size of the man, you'd have thought he'd have taken a public-house signboard at the very least." "Size in matters of pictorial art is nothing, Valentine," explained the schoolmaster. "Some of the biggest books and pictures have been written and painted by the smallest men of their inches you could imagine." "All the same, give me they whacking pickshers you see hanging outside a circus," said Mr. Huggins. "In my time I've marked pickshers to the full so large as a rick-cloth, all a-flaming with tigers and spotted leopards and wild men, till you might think you was walking straight into them savage, foreign places where such things come from. If William could paint like that, I doubt he'd make a fortune."