all till he was well nigh tired of them. Meanwhile, he worked steadily at his grand Academy picture of "The Seven Mountains from the Summit of the Petersberg." His plan of campaign, in short, was own brother to every other struggling young artist's. He meant to do "a lot of little pot-boilers for the illustrated magazines, don't you know, or the weekly papers," and to live upon those while he devoted his energies to the real Work of Art which was to raise him with a bound to the front rank of living painters. Wyllie had done it, you see, with his great Thames picture, so why shouldn't Guy Lethbridge? The Chantrey Bequest was meant on purpose for the encouragement of such works as the "Seven Mountains from the Summit of the Petersberg." The trustees were bound to buy it as soon as they saw it hung on the line at the Academy; for they are men of taste, and men of knowledge, and men of experience; and if they don't know a good thing when they see it, what's the use of an Academy, anyway, I ask you?
Incredible as it may seem, however, the pot-boilers failed to boil the pot. Guy sent his sketches, with elucidatory remarks, to the editors of nearly every illustrated paper in Great Britain and Ireland or the adjacent islands; who declined them with thanks, and with surprising unanimity. They were the same sketches, to be sure, which ran afterwards through eight numbers of a leading art review, and were then reproduced as an illustrated gift-book, which our most authoritative critic pronounced in The Bystander to be "the gem of the season." But that was after Guy Lethbridge became famous. At the time, those busy editors didn't look at the drawings at all, or, if they looked at them, observed with the weary sigh peculiar to the overworked editorial organism, "Ah, the Rhine again! Overdone, decidedly. The public won't stand any more Rhine at any price." For those were the days when there was a run on the Thames and our domestic scenery; and everybody who was anybody lodged his easel in a houseboat.
"Lunch in the hills."
Thus it gradually happened that while the Great Work progressed, the pipe got smoked out, and the pounds evaporated. Guy had lived sparingly at the Berliner-Hof—very sparingly indeed. He had breakfasted early on his roll and coffee; bought a penn'orth of bread and a bunch or two of grapes for his frugal lunch on the hills where he painted; and dined à la carte, when daylight failed, off the cheapest and most sustaining of the landlord's dishes. His drink was Bavarian beer, or more latterly, water; yet in spite of economy the marks slipped away with surprising nimbleness; and by the end of September, Guy woke up one morning without even the talisman of that proverbial sixpence which was to land him in safety at the Port of London. His
He had delayed things too long; hoping against hope, he had believed to the last that the Porte-Crayon or the Studio must surely accept his graceful and easy Rhenish sketches. He knew they were clever; he knew they had qualities; and he couldn't believe in his innocent soul all the art-editors of his country were an amalgamated pack of Banded Duffers. Somebody must surely see merit at last in his "Royal Stolzenfels"; somebody must surely descry in the end the fantastic exuberance of his "Hundred-towered Andernach." So he waited and waited on, expecting every day some change in his fortunes, till the fatal moment at length arrived when he paid his last mark
