confessed as
much. Lucian, who had left his easel, now moved towards it again, and
stood scanning his work with the painter's suddenly absorbed gaze--as
though he had forgotten, for the moment, everything else in the world
but that; then he sat down, as if unable to resist it, and began to add
a touch or two, while (with his disengaged faculties) he was good enough
to give to his cousin, of his own accord, a brief account of himself in
the present, as well as the past. It seemed that he was by profession a
civil engineer (as he had already told Garda), and that the party of
which he was chief were engaged in surveying for a proposed railway,
which would reach Gracias-a-Dios (he thought) in about seventy-five
years. However, that was nothing to him; there was undoubtedly a company
(they had got an English lord in it), and he, Lucian, was willing to
survey for them, if it amused them to have surveying done; that part of
the scheme, at least, was paid for. His party were now some distance
north of Gracias, they had reached one of the swamps; it had occurred to
him that it was a good time to take a day or two, and come down and see
the little old town on the coast; and as he was a dabbler in
water-colors, he had not been able to resist doing some of the little
"bits" he had found under his hand. "I was coming to see you, sir,
to-morrow," he concluded. "The truth is, I had only these rough clothes
with me; I have sent back for more."

"To the swamp?" said Garda.

"To the swamp--precisely; I keep them there very carefully in a dry
canoe."

"You must not only come and see us, Lucian, you must come and stay with
us," said the clergyman, cordially; "Penelope will hear of nothing
else," he added, bending in his near-sighted way to look at the picture,
and putting his nose close to Lucian's pinks and blues. "Isn't it
rather--rather bright?" he asked, blinking a little as he drew back. Mr.
Moore's idea of a picture was a landscape with a hill in the background,
a brook and willows in front, a church spire peeping out somewhere in
the middle distance, and a cow or two at the brook's edge, all painted
in a dark, melancholy--what he himself would have called a
chaste--green, even the cow partaking in some degree of that decorous
hue.

"It's not brighter than the reality, is it?" said Lucian.

"I--don't--know," answered Mr. Moore, straightening himself, and looking
about him as if to observe the reality, which he evidently was no