If one does, he will open his mouth and give out his honking, gabbling noise, loud enough to be heard in the hush of early morn a mile away.

What we want is to see some of the tenants of that farmyard before the house-folks are moving. The sparrows are waking up in their nesting-holes under the thatch. Then one of the farm cats crosses the road in front, with something in her mouth; not a rat or rabbit, nor yet a young game bird or hare, but a full-grown stoat. I have often seen cats with stoats and weasels in their mouths that they have killed; yet when puss gets a few yards out of bounds the keeper shoots her when he can. Over the thatched roof of the great barn a white owl flaps, with some small quarry in its bill. This is not held, as is usually the case, by one foot, or, if the prey is of some size, by both. The reason for this is soon made clear, for the bird makes directly for the top of the pigeon-cote, hooks on with its claws to the lower edge of a crack in the boards, and enters sideways in the most expeditious manner, through a small hole that looked only large enough for a starling to pass through.

If a bat enters the trunk of a hollow tree, or a hole in one of its limbs, it flies to it at full speed and vanishes like a flash. Owls do the same: they look large when on the wing, but I have repeatedly seen both species-the brown owl and the white owl-come with a dash and disappear like magic into their holes, not ten feet above my head. As to how it is done, that is only a matter for conjecture; the action is gone through far too quickly for you to make out its details.

To all appearance there is nothing in the farmyard but dirty trampled straw: there are one or two heaps about that look as if one of the farm hands had shaken some of it up, in passing through, with his fork. Presentlysomewhat to our surprise, for we are not thinking how the raised strawheaps come to be there one of them heaves up, the straw falls down on either side, and a great, gaunt, red-eyed vicious-looking sow rears herself up and shakes the straw from her, followed by nine perky-looking, nose-wriggling lit

tle snorkers. These were very wideawake all at once, as young pigs usually are: they rooted the straw up with their snouts, buried beneath it, poking their heads up to give out a snork and a week-week-week or two, just to let the remainder of their brothers and sisters know where they had got to: then, with one of those rushes that only young pigs can execute, they are all huddled round the sow, rubbing their snouts against her legs and lean sides in the most affectionate manner, to dash off again all round the yard, followed by their ever-watchful, vicious, grunting parent.

In ranging over wild places where rough swine with their litters have been turned out for the mast-feed of a whole season, eyes and ears have to be on the alert: for the creatures make rough hovers of brush-twigs, rough grass from the tussock-humps, and dead leaves. If you are unfortunate enough to stumble on or over one of these, the sow will charge with a rush, making the most desperate snaps with those powerful jaws which if they struck home would break one's leg. Fortunately the alarm notes proceeding from her disturbed progeny keep her within a yard or so of the spot. It is best to clear out and leave them all to it just as quickly as one can. This hover-making is the hereditary habit transmitted by their wild progenitors: "what is bred in the bone will out in the flesh."

The rattle of cart-horse hoofs sounds on the pitching of the stables, and the carter and his mate will soon be there to attend to their beasts: so we pass out of the yard again into the woodland road, to come back when all is bathed in the light of a golden eve: then the cornfields above the farm will show out as great patches of dead gold, the light will creep up and over those fields until it rests on the heather-covered hills directly above, which show out in great masses of purple or pale rose, according to the color of the heath. Just before the sun dips down, a great shaft of golden light falls for a few moments on the blooming heather, causing it to appear like some gigantic upland garden, a mass of bloom.

A SON OF THE MARSHES.

From Good Words. A MEMORABLE ART CLASS. Never without an afterglow of grateful memory will the first art class of the Working Men's College be remembered by those few living who were privileged to belong to it.

How long ago it seems! The whole social heavens have altered. In art, in theology, and in literature, their polarity has changed. It needs some effort to-day to recall the hope that the rise of the Broad Church inspired. The Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice's lectures are difficult enough reading to-day, but in 1850 we thought them inspired. The distinction and charm of Maurice's personality were part of the spell, but the whole time was one of expansion and hope.

Carlyle was writing "Past and Present;" Charles Kingsley as "Parson Lot" was translating Chartism into gospel, his latter-day and anti-game-law lyrics penetrated like leaven. Maurice's Bible-class for young men on the Gospel of John was a mystic outpouring. It seemed as if a new dispensation was at hand. I never knew how far our beloved John Ruskin accepted Mauriceism, but he threw himself heartily into art work at the College in 1854.

It was a foggy November night when three friends presented themselves at the dingy old rooms in Red Lion Square. One of the three was the late too little known artist and thinker, James Smetham. We sat upon a school bench and matriculated. The examination was not rigorous. We read a paragraph from a newspaper, wrote a few sentences from dictation, and worked a short division sum. But simple as it was, Smetham who read Horace and Ariosto in the original, broke down three times in the arithmetic.

We then went up to the studio. On the third floor two small rooms had been broken into one; they were So closely packed with easels as to deny elbow room. Our master had most generously provided materials and copies. We began to work. I cannot hope to describe the delights of those evenings. Twice a week John Ruskin positively beamed; he devoted himself to those who gave themselves sincerely to study. VOL. XV. 802

LIVING AGE.

He taught each of us separately, studying the capacities of each student.

We drew a plaster of Paris ball, giving the intersecting shadows of a score of gas lights; then a small plaster cast of a natural leaf. After that he went to nature; a spray of dried laurel leaves, a feather, a bit of spar to show the lines of cleavage; every kind of natural structure. He soon encouraged us to try color, warning us that gaslight altered an the values, but saying that color was too delightful to be foregone. For one pupil he would put a cairngorm pebble or fluor-spar into a tumbler of water, and set him to trace their tangled veins of crimson and amethyst. For another he would bring lichen and fungi from Anerley Woods. Once, to fill us with despair of color he brought a case of West Indian birds unstuffed, as the collector had stored them, all rubies and emeralds. Sometimes it was a fifteenth-century Gothic missal, when he set us counting the order of the colored leaves in each spray of the MS. At other times it was a splendid Albert Dürer wood-cut that we might copy a square inch or two of herbage and identify the columbines and cyclamens. He talked much to the class, discursively but radiantly. I think I remember that in politics and religion he leaned to order rather than progress. He had just published his “Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds;" we hoped we understood it, and thought it admirable. I have a delightful memory of an architectural evening, principally given to French Gothic, comparing Amiens, Rouen, and Beauvais. He reprinted for us a chapter from the "Seven Lamps," with all the illustrations-"Notes on Northern Gothic." This brochure must be a treasure to-day. (Alas! I lent and lost my own.) On another night he introduced to us Alfred Rethel's work, especially the weird "Auch ein Todtentanz."

He was hard to please, I remember, in engraving. Etching he thought frivolous; even Rembrandt's were too elaborate and over subtle. He praised on the other hand the bold, graver work of the Florentines. For the eighteenthcentury lozenge shading he had reprobation only. He thought tints should

be line beside line. One day he hung up a proof of a saint by Domenichino, as "the worst specimen he had ever seen of a perilous art." He praised Blake warmly, especially the "Book of Job," which he said was greater than much of Rembrandt.

But he detested most of all the Flaxman outlines, illustrations of Homer and Dante. He said they were "examples of every kind of falsehood and feebleness which it was possible for a trained artist to commit. You could not have a more finished example of learned error, amiable want of meaning, and bad drawing with a steady hand." And surely we agree with him. He told us if we got to like large, cross-hatched, finished prints after Correggio or Raphael we were lost, unless we forthwith sold, or better still, burned them. I showed him a purchase I had made from a Saturday night's umbrella, when I bought for a few pence a Marc Antonio's "Muses on Parnassus" and two of Ruysdael's marvellous etchings. But Albert Dürer was his favorite master. We copied bits of the great and smaller passions, the "St. Hubert" and the "St. Jerome." Nor were we allowed to protest against the angularities and deformed toes of the great Nüremberger's creation. But of course the polestar of his artistic heavens was Turner. One by one, he brought for us to examine his marvels of water-color art from Denmark Hill. He would point out the subtleties and felicities in their composition, analyzing on a blackboard their line schemes. Sometimes he would make us copy minute portions of a "Liber," some line of footsteps, or the handles of a plough. He would not allow us to copy Turner in colors, saying that would come years after, at present nothing of these but line. How generous he was! He had reams of the best stout drawing-paper made specially for us, supplying every convenience the little rooms would hold. He commissioned William Hunt of the Old Water Color Society to paint two subjects for the class, and both were masterpieces. One was a golden, metallic, dried herring and some open mussel-shells, and the other some eggs and yellow onions; to show how brilliant the humblest subjects might become in a master's hands.

He used to say if you gave one man the pigments of every tint of the rainbow, he would paint you a dull picture, but give another a little whitening, or a little slate and brickdust, and he will produce a brilliant and harmonious

one.

Although I have reason to think he was at this time privately suffering, he seemed delighted with his class. His face would light up when he saw a piece of honest or delicate work; it was, perhaps, his greatest fault as a teacher that he was sometimes too lavish of his praise. He had spent one happy summer in Switzerland, and brought to show us a folio of his work. He had drawn and painted nothing but glaciers. He compared them to dragons, to serpents. They had cast a fetichistic spell over him. On formal occasions he did not speak well. His style was overelaborate and paradoxical, but on these evenings he talked divinely; we were carried away by the current of his enthusiasm. Often his subject was poetry, and then he was never tired of praising Scott. I could not give in to his dispraise of Coleridge as "sickly and useless," or of Shelley as "shallow and verbose," though I feared he might be right, and that we should have to come round to think so.

He took a great interest in the art work of a young publisher's assistant, and sent him, at his own expense, to Venice to copy a few bits of Byzantine sculpture there. When the student arrived he settled down to Titian's "Peter Martyr" instead. Ruskin was indignant, but B- managed to stay on and paint Venice for himself. He soon got patronized by wealthy Englishmen and Americans, and lived there till his death.

Ruskin never himself knew how much he did for many of us. It is not too much to say that the whole of our following lives have been enriched by these hours we spent with him. One student drew birds' nests more minutely than Hunt, and another finished groups of fungi beyond human eyesight.

I cannot remember how soon Dante Gabriel Rossetti became our joint teacher. It may have been from the first. With him also was associated Mr. Lowes Dickinson. Rossetti came on

alternate evenings with Ruskin, and taught figure and water-color painting. He was very kind and sincere; he spoke little, and with a mournful inflection of voice. Art was his religion, he never talked Mauriceism. Rossetti was not without an unexpected flash of satire. Once a pompous student, who, unlike the generality of us, was able to buy adequate art materials, asked Rossetti whose colors he advised us to get, "those of Messrs. R- or of Messrs. W —and N -?" "Ah!" said Rossetti, "I don't know, I generally use the halfpenny colors from the oil-shop my self." And I can almost believe it, for I well remember a shabby box of fragments, that he used to rattle amongst, rubbing with an almost dry brush on hard chips, but getting always the color he wanted with surprising and harmonious effects. His method was, I have heard, adopted from Madox Brown; they called it the "dry brush style." Cobalt and vermilion were mixed to a neutral, and the charged brush stroked on a waste piece of paper till it ceased to streak. When the shaded scheme of the design was worked over, it had the effect of an unpleasantly toned aquatint. Into the interstices of the paper he worked bright chrome, cobalt, and red lead! (I am sure red lead, with pangs of conscience as being treacherous.) For flesh he used vermilion with raw emerald green, and a little purple carmine. Half done, his work had a strange iridescence, but he was far too sensitive an artist to be satisfied till he got the depth and harmony he sought; and I feel sure, although he disclaimed it, and believed somehow he had not done it, he glazed and deepened his shadows. He objected to pencil outlines. He would say: "The masses of shade are the drawing, begin with them. The first fact to notice is the shade on one side the nose, put that in as tint; then the shade on cheek and chin." He thought it insincere to put drawing where it was only inferred. Thus, when I had once drawn the return to an eyelid, he said: "Get rid of that academic fribble! draw only what you see." On one occasion, Ruskin had been denying wings to angels, but wishing to show how pinions should be drawn, he

sent into our class-room a great hamper of birds. There was a fine cock pheasant, a wild duck, a partridge, a woodpigeon, and other birds. He then challenged Rossetti, Lowes Dickinson, and Smetham, to paint a specimen for our instruction. Dickinson chose the pheasant, and tossing it upon the table, in an hour had struck out a bold romantic sketch in browns and reds that was very convincing. The partridge and wood-pigeon were also painted. Rossetti got the duck, and spent an hour tying it on a drawing-board with string into a round heap. The grey dry brush went on, we watching with profound interest. The next evening he proceeded to cover it with bright chrome. We grew uneasy, we could see no yellow in the bird. For the next few nights he was absent, and before the drawing could proceed another stage, the housekeeper for sanitary reasons had removed the model; we never knew what scheme he had in his mind. Yet he could inspire and even thrill us; we loved him so, and were happy to render him the smallest service. I have said he talked little, but at times he did so enthusiastically. I remember how he came late one night and said he had been with the Brownings, and had played with their only child, "a boy who. did not know his parents were poets," and that Mrs. Browning had read some pages from her new poem that would be immortal. It was to be called "Aurora Leigh." Whereat some one asked what was Robert Browning as a poet like?" Rossetti cried fiercely, "Like?" Why, in his lyrics, he is like Shelley, in his dramas he is like Shakespeare!"

Sometimes we got permission to see his pictures. I remember at this time, his memorable cupboard, painted I think for William Morris. On one lid was Dante's first meeting with Beatrice in a Florence street, and on the other Dante's last vision of her in the earthly paradise, when she lifts her veil and says, "Look at me well, for in sooth I am Beatrice." She is standing beside a lovely hedge of roses with brilliant birds flying. The keyhole and the handle came frankly into the picture. I have seen them since; the furniture removed and the panels framed as pictures. But they looked less startlingly

never seen

beautiful than at first. Another picture of Rossetti's I have described since, was "The first night after the Crucifixion." John the disciple had taken Mary to his own home. A window looked out over a distant Calvary bereft of its crosses. Mary was lighting the watch lamp, John was bent pondering a scroll of Isaiah. A stormy sunset flooded the picture with purple light. The whole, as I remember it now, was very impressive. I think there must have been frequent amazing failure in the drawing, but the color was so deep and "Belliniesque" in its glow that all its faults were condoned after one impatient glance. The "Borgia family" was a subject several times attempted. In the one I liked best Lucrezia leaned back in her chair, playing with a golden chain. She wore a glorious dress, and had a fleece of golden hair. The hateful pope leered, and Cæsar furtively dropped poison in the wine; in front a boy and a girl danced, and behind a maid-servant from a window looked down upon the tragedy. Other pictures were, "Seeing Themselves," "Dr. Johnson and the Fair Methodists," "Mary at the House of Simon the Pharisee," and the grotesque "Jan Van Eyck's Studio." We saw these and others by stealth. He did not want our worship. About this time the illustrated Tennyson was being prepared. Rossetti drew five subjects for it. Some of these were intrusted to that supreme engraver, W. J. Linton. The two men could not understand each other. Rossetti was furious at the liberties Linton took with his designs. Linton sneered, "If I had cut them as he drew them! ! !"

About this time too I saw on the wood the charming drawing of the Maids of Elfin Mere done for that violet of a book, "Day and Night Songs," by William Allingham, published in 1855. In 1862 he designed a mystical frontispiece to his sister Christina's volume, "The Goblin Market and other Poems." Besides these I am not aware that he drew again for the press. One day Rossetti scribbled in ink on the back of a letter

1 I saw on the wood the mysterious, heading to the "palace of art"-St. Cicely with lovely falling hair and the amazing" angel that looked at her." Below a soldier ate an apple and a dove escaped from a prison grating.

a motive for a picture, two lovers embracing in a turret of a castle wall. The subject pleased him and he blotted in a scheme of color. Both figures wore red. The wall against which they stood was red also. Red also was the woman's hair. The fields beyond were vivid green and the sky blue. This scrap of paper had an indescribable dignity and a charm almost Titianesque. It was as full of poetry as a border ballad. He painted it later on, but never so well as in the rude, letter-paper sketch.

Rossetti was living then in chambers in Chatham Place, Blackfriars. The rooms might have been in Venice for their medieval charm and their many surprises.

In one corner he had put two large mirrors at right angles, which gave a startling vision of endless beautiful rooms beyond. He early discovered the splendid decorative value of old embossed Spanish leather.

As a teacher Rossetti was often absent. Sometimes (the now Sir Edward) Burne-Jones took his place; once I think Windus came. Some one asked Ruskin if Rossetti were industrious; Ruskin replied, “If you call beginning work at nine o'clock at night and working impetuously till daybreak, then sleeping till afternoon, industrious, he may be."

In 1856 the college moved from Red Lion Square to Great Ormond Street, where the class had more room, but, alas! we lost our masters. Ruskin went abroad, and although he came to address us once or twice the class was under other management. For a time Ford Maddox Brown was an inspiring teacher. Burne-Jones, who was then Venetian in feeling, rather than Florentine, came for some months. Mr. Valentine Prinsep followed, giving valuable teaching; but the class had changed. Maurice and Kingsley died. The old unity was gone. We did much more life work. Our models were simple, unprofessional folk. One night the sitter was absent, and a student went into the street to capture a substitute. After some time he returned with two reluctant navvies, tempted by half a crown each for the evening. They were very suspicious; and when they had stumbled up two flights of stairs the door of the physiology class stood open, with