application of the local climate that he owed, not only much of the sale of Thirteen Star, but the whole business of his advertising agency. The large desk (to resume our survey of the office) stood about the middle, knee-deep in stacks of handbills and posters, of _Why Drink French Brandy?_ and _The Advertiser's Vade-Mecum._ It was flanked upon the one hand by two female type-writers, who rested not between the hours of nine and four, and upon the other by a model of the agricultural machine. The walls, where they were not broken by telephone boxes and a couple of photographs--one representing the wreck of the James L. Moody on a bold and broken coast, the other the Saturday tug alive with amateur fishers--almost disappeared under oil-paintings gaudily framed. Many of these were relics of the Latin Quarter, and I must do Pinkerton the justice to say that none of them were bad, and some had remarkable merit. They went off slowly but for handsome figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the work of local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to review and criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were saleable. I said so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a miserable renegade, bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at pictures thenceforward, not with the eye of the artist, but the dealer; and I saw the stream widen that divided me from all I loved. “Now, Loudon,” Pinkerton had said, the morning after the lecture, “now Loudon, we can go at it shoulder to shoulder. This is what I have longed for: I wanted two heads and four arms; and now I have 'em. You'll find it's just the same as art--all observation and imagination; only more movement. Just wait till you begin to feel the charm!”