dores me!" and I left him
vigorously painting pot-boilers. Then in a damp dell among the willows of
the Dal I found a foreigner in spectacles, and the light upon his pictures
was the light that never was on sea or land; but through a silvery mist
the willows showed ghostly grey, and a shadowy group of classic nymphs
were ringed in the dance, and I cried "O Corot! lend me your spectacles. I
fain, like you, would see crude nature dimmed to a silvery perpetual
twilight." And Corot replied: "Mon ami moi je ne vois jamais le soleil, je
me plonge toujours, dans les ombres bleuatres et les rayons pales de
l'aube."

Then upward I fared till, treading the clear heights, I found one
frantically painting the peaks and pinnacles of the mountains in weird
stipples of alternate red and blue.

"Great heavens!" I exclaimed, "what disordered manner is this!"

The artist glanced swiftly at me, and said disdainfully: "I am a modern of
the moderns, and if you cannot see that mountains are like that, it is
your fault--not mine. Go back, you stand too close."

And as I went back I looked over my shoulder, and, truly, the flaring
rose-colour had blended amicably with the blue, and I admitted that
perhaps Segantini was not so mad as he looked.

A little lower down a stout Scotchman painted a flowery valley. The
flowers were many and bright, but not so garish as they appeared to him,
and I hinted as much; but he scorned my criticism.

"Mon," he shouted, "I painted the Three Graces, an' they made me an
Academeesian. I painted a flowery glen in the Tyrol (dearie me, but thae
flowers cost me a fortune in blue paint), and it was coft for the Chantry
Bequest, and hoo daur _you_ talk to me?"

Then I departed hurriedly and came upon four men, two of them with long
beards, and all with unkempt hair, laboriously depicting a blue pine,
needle by needle, and every one in its proper place. I asked them if
theirs was not a very troublesome way of painting.

They looked at one another with earnest blue eyes, and remarked that here
was evidently a Philistine who knew not Cimabue and cared not a jot for
Giotto; and the first said: "Sir, methinks he who would climb the golden
stairs should do so step by step;" and the second said, sadly: "We are but
scapegoats, truly, being cast forth by the vindictive Victorians of our
day."

The third murmured in somewhat broken English.

"Victoria Victrix,
Beata Beatrix,"

whereby I recognised him to be a p