en an ordained clergyman of the
Church of England, and I grinned, remembering how, when a Royal visitor
was expected at the great man's studio, the factotum had been bidden to
wash his face, and had washed one half of it, leaving the other half in
drab eclipse, like the picture-restorers' trade-advertisement of a canvas
partially cleansed.

Idly I tossed the butt of a finished cigar over the bridge balustrade.
Idly my eye followed it down to the filthy, sluggishly-creeping water that
flows round the bend, under the damp rear-garden walls below.

A policeman and a bargeman were just taking the body of an old man out of
that turbid canal-stream. It was dressed in pauper's garments, and its
stiffened knees were bent, and its rigid elbows crooked, and a
dishonoured, dripping beard of grey hung over the soulless breast.

The dreadful eyes were open, staring up at the leaden March sky. His face,
with the dread pallor of Death upon it, and the mud-stains wiped away by a
rough but not unkindly hand, was cleaner than I had ever seen it in life.

Nevertheless, I recognised in the soaked body in its workhouse livery the
very man the thought of whom had haunted me, the great Bohemian painter's
drunken studio-drudge.

VIII

School at the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp was breaking up,
suddenly and without warning, very soon after the beginning of the
Christmas term. Many of the pupils had already left in obedience to urgent
telegrams from relatives in Cape Colony or in the Transvaal, and every
Dutch girl among the sixty knew the reason why, but was too astute to hint
of it, and every English girl was at least as wise, but pride kept her
silent, and the Americans and the Germans exchanged glances of
intelligence, and whispered in corners of impending war between John Bull
and Oom Paul.

That deep and festering political hatreds, fierce enthusiasms, inherited
pride of race, and instilled pride in nationality, were covered by worked
apron-bibs, and even childish pinafores, is anyone likely to doubt?
Schoolgirls can be patriots as well as rebels, and the seminary can vie
with the college, or possibly outdo it, occasion given. Ask Juliette Adam
whether the bread-and-butter misses of France in the year 1847 did not
squabble over the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and the greed of M.
Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon and the theories of Louis Blanc, of
Odilon Barrot, and Ledru-Rollin? And I who write, have I no