It has been well to reach Manningtree by the fairly good road from Colchester; but we must go to the westward a little, and cross the Stour, leaving Essex and our peninsula for a while if we would not miss perhaps the most precious association of the valley of the Stour. It is East Bergholt, the birthplace of John Constable, the miller's son, and here we are in the country which he once had the pleasure of hearing described in his presence by a complete stranger as "Constable's country." This was the more strange in that, like many another artist before him and since his day--the word "artist" is used in its widest sense--he was not appreciated at his full worth while he lived among men. A few days or a week spent in Constable's country, by painters or by those who aspire to know something of the spirit of landscape painting, are now to be regarded as time spent pleasantly, profitably, and naturally by men and women of cultivated taste; but the stranger on the Ipswich coach who said in his hearing, "This is Constable's country," was in advance of the average taste of his generation, for, although Constable was appreciated in France before those of his own race were awake to his merits, it is one of the cruel ironies of fate that, when the great landscape painter died, his studio was full of unsold pictures. His case, unlike that of Thomas Gainsborough, whom we shall meet soon, was one in which a stolid parent did his best to choke the spring of artistic spirit in its efforts to express itself in form and colour. It was also one compelling the quotation, "God fulfils Himself in many ways." He showed his leanings in early boy-hood, doubtless in the usual manner, when he was a pupil in the grammar school at Dedham, in Essex and close by--the tower of Dedham Church is a prominent object in many of his landscapes. Again, what country-bred man does not remember how, when the plumber was called in (he was usually painter and glazier too), undiluted joy was to be obtained from watching him at work, from working his divine putty into fantastic shapes, from unlicensed meddling with his brushes and paints? John Constable, too, watched his father's plumber, one Dunthune, to some purpose, and Dunthune was no ordinary plumber. He knew something of landscape painting, and is said to have inspired the boy to that habit of studying in the open air which, in all probability, stood in little need of inspiration. In this is nothing of unnatural novelty. Was not John Crome, of Norwich, apprenticed to a coach and sign-painter, or, as some have it, to a house-painter? The wonder is rather that more house-painters do not develop some measure of artistic proficiency.