, but our
descriptions of the beauty of the scenery had roused him to make another
attempt for the "Household Album." Seldom lastingly provided, for his
own part, with apparatus of any kind, Jack had a genius for purveying
all that he required in an emergency. On this occasion he had borrowed
Mrs. Arkwright's paint-box (without leave), and was by no means ill
supplied with pencils and brushes which certainly were not his own. He
had hastily stripped a couple of sheets from my block whilst I was
dressing, and with these materials he seated himself on that side of me
which enabled him to dip into my water-pot, and began to paint.

Not half-way through my outline, I was just beginning to realize the
complexities of a bird's-eye view with your middle distance in a
valley, and your foreground sloping steeply upwards to your feet, when
Jack, washing out a large, dyed sable sky-brush in my pot, with an
amount of splashing that savoured of triumph, said:

"_That's_ done!"

I paused in a vigorous mental effort to put aside my _knowledge_ of the
relative sizes of objects, and to _see_ that a top stone of my
foreground wall covered three fields, the river, and half the river's
bank beyond.

"_Done?_" I exclaimed. Jack put his brush into his mouth, in defiance of
all rules, and deliberately sucked it dry. Then he waved his sketch
before my eyes.

"The effect's rather good," I confessed, "but oh, Jack, it's out of all
proportion! That gate really looks as big as the whole valley and the
hills beyond. The top of the gate-post ought to be up in the sky."

"It would look beastly ugly if it was," replied he complacently.

"You've got a very good tint for those hills; but the foreground is mere
scrambling. Oh, Jack, do finish it a little more! You would draw so
nicely if you had any patience."

"How imperfectly you understand my character," said Jack, packing up his
traps. "I would sit on a monument and smile at grief with any one, this
very day, if the monument were in a grove, or even if I had an umbrella
to smile under. To sit unsheltered under this roasting sun, and make
myself giddy by gauging proportions with a pencil at the end of my nose,
or smudging my mistakes with melting india-rubber, is quite another
matter. I'm off to Eleanor. I've got another sheet of paper, and I think
trees are rather in my line."

"I _thought_ my block looked smaller," said I, rapidly comparing Jack's
paper and my own, with a feeling for size