y again. He might have better Sunday thoughts; perhaps
he will have some day. At least he is a man, and a brave one; and as
the greater contains the less, surely before a man can be a good man,
he must be a brave one first, much more a man at all. Cowards, old
Odin held, inevitably went to the very bottom of Hela-pool, and by no
possibility, unless of course they became brave at last, could rise
out of that everlasting bog, but sank whining lower and lower, like
mired cattle, to all eternity in the unfathomable peat-slime. And if
the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation, and the eighth
verse, is to be taken as it stands, their doom has not altered since
Odin's time, unless to become still worse.

Tom came up, over the home-close and through the barton-gate, through
the farm-yard, and stopped at last at the porch. The front door was
open, and the door beyond it; and ere he knocked, he stopped, looking
in silence at a picture which held him spellbound for a moment by its
rich and yet quiet beauty.

Tom was no artist, and knew no more of painting, in spite of his
old friendship with Claude, than was to be expected of a keen and
observant naturalist who had seen half the globe. Indeed, he had been
in the habit of snubbing Claude's profession; and of arriving, on
pre-Raphaelite grounds, at a by no means pre-Raphaelite conclusion.
"A picture, you say, is worth nothing unless you copy Nature. But you
can't copy her. She is ten times more gorgeous than any man can dare
represent her. Ergo, every picture is a failure; and the nearest
hedge-bush is worth all your galleries together"--a syllogism of sharp
edge, which he would back up by Byron's--

"I've seen much finer women, ripe and real,
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal."

But here was one of Nature's own pictures, drawn and coloured by more
than mortal hand, and framed over and above, ready to his eye, by the
square of the dark doorway, beyond which all was flooded with the full
glory, of the low north-western sun.

A dark oak-ribbed ceiling; walls of pale fawn-yellow; an open window,
showing a corner of rich olive-stone wall, enamelled with golden
lichens, orange and green combs of polypody, pink and grey tufts of
pellitory, all glowing in the sunlight.

Above the window-sill rose a bush of maiden-blush roses; a tall spire
of blue monkshood; and one head of scarlet lychnis, like a spark
of fire; and behind all, the dark blue sea, which faded int