more complex and beautiful colour to him than mere brown), or
drinking in the blue of the scillas in the border with a sigh of
satisfaction. When he paused, Thomas would pause; as he feasted his
eyes, Thomas would rub his head against his master's legs, and stretch
his own. When Elspeth had cooked the fish, and my great-grandmother had
made the tea and arranged the flowers on the table, they would come in
together and condescend to their breakfasts, with the same air about
them both of having no responsibility in life but to find out sunny
spots and to enjoy themselves.

My great-grandfather's most charming paintings were sketches of flowers.
Ordinary stiff flower-paintings are of all paintings the most
uninteresting, I think; but his were of a very different kind. Each
sketch was a sort of idyll. Indeed, he would tell me stories of each as
he showed them.

Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, and
Elspeth's chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference to
the colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting in
the east winds or lying on damp grass to do this or that sketch.

"That'll be the one the master did before he was laid by with the
rheumatics," Elspeth said, when I described one of my favourites to her.
It was a spring sketch. My great-grandfather had lain face downwards on
the lawn to do it. This was to bring his eyes on a level with the subject
of his painting, which was this: a crocus of the exquisite shades of
lilac to be seen in some varieties, just full-blown, standing up in its
first beauty and freshness from its fringe of narrow silver-striped
leaves. The portrait was not an opaque and polished-looking painting on
smooth cardboard, but a sketch--indefinite at the outer edges of the
whole subject--on water-colour paper of moderate roughness. The throat
and part of the cup of the flower stood out from some shadow at the roots
of a plant beyond; a shadow of infinite gradation, and quite without the
blackness common to patches of shade as seen by untrained eyes. From the
level of my great-grandfather's view, as he lay in the grass, the border
looked a mere strip; close behind it was a hedge dividing the garden from
a field. Just by the crocus there was a gap in the hedge, which in the
sketch was indicated rather than drawn. And round the corner of the bare
thorn branches from the hedge-bank in the field there peeped a celandine
and a daisy. They w