. Most unwillingly I turned
one morning into Kauffer's; and I can not now imagine why I did it,
for emulation of the Assistant Adjutant-General was really not motive
enough, unless it was with an instinct prepared to stumble upon matter
germane in an absurd degree to this little history.

I had the honour to be subjected to the searching analysis of Mr.
Kauffer himself. It was he who placed the chair and arranged the screw,
he who fixed the angle of my chin and gently disposed my fingers on my
knee. He gave me, I remember, a recent portrait of the Viceroy to fix
my eye upon, doubtless with the purpose of inspiring my countenance
with the devotion which would sit suitably upon one of His Excellency's
slaves, and when it was all over he conducted me into another apartment
in order that I might see the very latest viceregal group--a domestic
one, including the Staff. The walls of the room contained what is
usually there, the enlarged photograph, the coloured photograph, the
amateur theatrical group, the group of His Excellency's Executive
Council, the native dignitary with a diamond-tipped aigrette in the
front of his turban. The copy in oils of some old Italian landscape,
very black and yellow, also held its invariable place, and above it,
very near the ceiling, a line of canvases which, had I not been led past
them to inspect our ruler and his family, who sat transfixed on an easel
in a resplendent frame, would probably have escaped my attention. I did
proper homage to the easel, and then turned to those pictures. It was
plain enough who had painted them. Armour's broad brush stood out all
over them. They were mostly Indian sporting subjects, the incident
a trifle elliptical, the drawing unequal, but the verve and feeling
unmistakeable, and colour to send a quiver of glorious acquiescence
through you like a pang. What astonished me was the number of them;
there must have been at least a dozen, all the same size and shape, all
hanging in a line of dazzling repetition. Here then was the explanation
of Armour's seeming curious lack of output, and plain denial of the
supposition that he spent the whole of his time in doing the little
wooden 'pochade' things whose sweetness and delicacy had so feasted our
eyes elsewhere. It was part, no doubt, of his absolutely uncommercial
nature--we had experienced together passages of the keenest
embarrassment over my purchase of some of his studies--that he had not
mentioned these more se