The third murmured in somewhat broken English.

  “Victoria Victrix,
  Beata Beatrix,”

whereby I recognised him to be a poet, if not a painter.

But the fourth—­an energetic-looking man with a somewhat arrogant manner—­said briskly:  “Perchance the ass is right; these pine needles are becoming monotonous, and I have seventeen million four hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred and eleven more to do.  Beshrew me if I do not take to pot-boiling!”

Down by the water-side a lady sat, sketching in water-colours for dear life; around her lay a litter of half-finished works, scattered like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa.  I approached her, quite friendly, and offered to gather them up for her—­at least some of them, saying soothingly, for I saw she was in a temper—­

“Dear, dear, Clara, why, what is the matter?”

“I am painting the Venice of the East,” she cried petulantly, “but for the life of me I can’t see a campanile, and how can I possibly paint a picture without a campanile?”

I understood that, of course, she couldn’t, so I stole away softly on tip-toe, leaving her turning doungas into gondolas for all she was worth.

A dark, dapper man, with an alert air and an eyeglass, sat near the seventh bridge, writing.  Beside him stood an easel and other painting-gear.  I asked him what he was doing, and he answered, with a fine smile, “I am gently making enemies;” so, to turn the subject, I picked up a large canvas, smeared over with invisible grey, like the broadside of a modern battleship, and sprinkled here and there with pale yellow blobs.

“What have we here, James?” I inquired cheerfully, and he, staying his claw-like hand in mid-air, made reply—­

“A chromatic in tones of sad colour, with golden accidentals—­Kashmir night-lights.”

“Ah! quite so,” I exclaimed; “but have I got it right side up?”

He looked at it doubtfully for a moment, then, pointing to a remarkable butterfly (Vanessa Sifflerius) depicted in the corner, cried:  “It’s all right; you’ll never make a mistake if you keep this insect in the right bottom corner.  It is put there on purpose.”

Lastly, on an eminence I saw a man like an eagle, sitting facing full the sun, and upon his glowing canvas was portrayed the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth, and behind him sat one who patted him upon the back, and looked at intervals over his shoulder at the glorious work, and then wrote in a book a eulogy thereof; and I, too, came and looked over the painter’s shoulder, and I muttered, with Oliver Wendell Holmes,

  “The foreground golden dirt,
  The sunshine painted with a squirt.”

Then the man who patted the painter on the back turned upon me aggressively, and said:  “This is the only painter who ever was, or will be, and if you don’t agree with me you are a fool.”  The painter, smiling a sly Monna-Lisan smile of triumph, remarked:  “Right you are, John.  I rather think this will knock that rascal Claude,” and I laughed so that I awoke; but the memory of the dream remained with me, and it seemed to me that, perhaps, we poor amateurs might not be any better able to compass aught but caricatures of this marvellous scenery than the ghostly limners of my dream!