way. T.H.

January 1896.

BOOK THE FIRST. GEORGE SOMERSET.

I.

The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half-an-hour of its
setting; but the sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring
and copying the chevroned doorway--a bold and quaint example of a
transitional style of architecture, which formed the tower entrance to
an English village church. The graveyard being quite open on its western
side, the tweed-clad figure of the young draughtsman, and the tall mass
of antique masonry which rose above him to a battlemented parapet,
were fired to a great brightness by the solar rays, that crossed the
neighbouring mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes groups of
equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly.

He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant
chromatic effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was
brought home to his intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework
under his touch when measuring; which led him at length to turn his head
and gaze on its cause.

There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as much
meditative melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the human decline and
death that it illustrates being too obvious to escape the notice of
the simplest observer. The sketcher, as if he had been brought to this
reflection many hundreds of times before by the same spectacle, showed
that he did not wish to pursue it just now, by turning away his face
after a few moments, to resume his architectural studies.

He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old
workers whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six hundred years
after the original performance had ceased and the performers passed into
the unseen. By means of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which
he pressed around and into the fillets and hollows with his finger and
thumb, he transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing,
that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were also a
sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and other mathematical
instruments. When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he returned to
the doorway to copy another as before.

It being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and the
stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders,
not only in England, but throughout the temperate zone, few of the
homeward-bound labourers p