They met but few passengers on their path through
the fields,—a respectable, staid, elderly
couple, who had the air of a Dissenting minister and
his wife; a girl of fourteen leading a little boy seven
years younger by the hand; a pair of lovers, evidently
lovers at least to the eye of Tom Bowles; for, on
regarding them as they passed unheeding him, he winced,
and his face changed. Even after they had passed,
Kenelm saw on the face that pain lingered there:
the lips were tightly compressed, and their corners
gloomily drawn down.
Just at this moment a dog rushed towards them with
a short quick bark,—a Pomeranian dog with
pointed nose and pricked ears. It hushed its
bark as it neared Kenelm, sniffed his trousers, and
wagged its tail.
“By the sacred Nine,” cried Kenelm, “thou
art the dog with the tin tray! where is thy master?”
The dog seemed to understand the question, for it
turned its head significantly; and Kenelm saw, seated
under a lime-tree, at a good distance from the path,
a man, with book in hand, evidently employed in sketching.
“Come this way,” he said to Tom:
“I recognize an acquaintance. You will
like him.” Tom desired no new acquaintance
at that moment, but he followed Kenelm submissively.
“YOU see we are fated to meet again,”
said Kenelm, stretching himself at his ease beside
the Wandering Minstrel, and motioning Tom to do the
same. “But you seem to add the accomplishment
of drawing to that of verse-making! You sketch
from what you call Nature?”
“From what I call Nature! yes, sometimes.”
“And do you not find in drawing, as in verse-making,
the truth that I have before sought to din into your
reluctant ears; namely, that Nature has no voice except
that which man breathes into her out of his mind?
I would lay a wager that the sketch you are now taking
is rather an attempt to make her embody some thought
of your own, than to present her outlines as they
appear to any other observer. Permit me to judge
for myself.” And he bent over the sketch-book.
It is often difficult for one who is not himself
an artist nor a connoisseur to judge whether the pencilled
jottings in an impromptu sketch are by the hand of
a professed master or a mere amateur. Kenelm
was neither artist nor connoisseur, but the mere pencil-work
seemed to him much what might be expected from any
man with an accurate eye who had taken a certain number
of lessons from a good drawing-master. It was
enough for him, however, that it furnished an illustration
of his own theory. “I was right,”
he cried triumphantly. “From this height
there is a beautiful view, as it presents itself to
me; a beautiful view of the town, its meadows, its
river, harmonized by the sunset; for sunset, like
gilding, unites conflicting colours, and softens them
in uniting. But I see nothing of that view in
your sketch. What I do see is to me mysterious.”
