known from the cradle should be master of such mysteries?" And lo! he had ended, and the vasty deep was mine to hang in the drawing-room. I was compelled to own that the impossible had happened. The boy had painted a picture, a picture, by Neptune! which breathed salt air like an onshore gale.
After my first stunned feeling had passed away, other reflections came to me. "Since," I thought, "a friend of mine can learn in his spare time to produce results so remarkable, it is clear that the trick is easier of acquirement than I supposed. After all, many young girls with no more brains than their sisters do produce most tolerable sketches, and it is not to be supposed that they devote more than a small proportion of their leisure to gaining their facility. Golf and lawn tennis, croquet and district visiting, these and other amusements claim them visibly for many of their waking hours, yet they produce pictures of which no one can mistake the meaning. Here, one shall say with certainty, is the representation of a lake with undoubted swans; this can only figure a distant mountain, and if these streaks and gloom be not like a sunset behind a churchyard, they are like nothing. Go to!" I said. "Let us emulate these damsels."
I conceived a contempt for water-colour sketch-
