'But we grow cotton in Queensland and the northern territory.'

'Yes, and we can also grow silk; at least, silkworms and mulberries thrive with us.'

'I am vanquished, Mr. Vincent. I have not another word to say. The silken drapery is perfectly legitimate.'

'But still, as silk is not yet one of our established industries, we must enhance its effect by something characteristically colonial,' said Mr. Vincent, with the dispassionate fairness of a mind too broad to be puffed up with a sense of its own critical acumen.

'Quite true—quite true. The salt-bush is very typical. How would it do to have salt-bush for the background, with a couple of sheep nibbling at it? They might be rather lean, to typify that this bush has often kept our flocks from starving.'

'If I were painting for such as you are, madame, my task would be an easy one—my labour of love, I should say; for on the day on which I cannot feel it is such, I never touch a brush. But to the ignorant on the one hand, and the malicious on the other—and in the colonies these are the two great classes for whom artists work—I say to these the sheep would be a stumbling-block. The one would think, and the other would say, without thinking, that the young woman was a shepherdess—"a reminiscence of the worst rococo period of unreal landscapes!" That's what the critic with a little wit and no conscience would say. No—my own idea, after long, and I may say painful thought, is to paint the figure with a garland of colonial flowers, holding a basket of colonial fruit, with a colonial bird on her shoulder pecking at it.'

'Oh, charming—charming! Really too exquisite, Mr. Vincent! Do tell me what flowers and what bird. The fruit—would you have grapes and oranges and peaches, and so on, or one kind?'

'I do not know about grapes. The colonial wine is really so very—— Well, I fear I am fastidious with wine.' It may be mentioned, en parenthèse, that Mr. Vincent usually smoked a strong cigar over his wine, and smacked his lips ecstatically when he gulped British champagne made of unripe gooseberries.

'Yes, and then one likes to encourage teetotal principles among the masses,' answered Mrs. Anstey-Hobbs. 'Perhaps we had better discard the grapes? And the flowers?'

'Well, I don't know the names of any colonial flowers; but I must ruralize a little in the Botanical Gardens. I suppose they have native ones there?'