It was during a long drive, in which we were exhibiting the country to some friends, that Eleanor and I chose the place of that particular sketching expedition. The views it furnished had the first, and almost the only, quality demanded by young and tyro sketchers—they were very pretty.
There was some variety, too, to justify our choice. From the sandy road, where a heathery bank afforded the convenience of seats, we could look down into a valley with a winding stream, whose banks rose into hillsides which lost themselves in finely-coloured mountains of moorland.
Farther on, a scramble on foot over walls and gates had led us into a wooded gorge fringed with ferns, where a group of trees of particularly graceful form roused Eleanor’s admiration.
“What a lovely view!” had burst from the lips of our friends at every quarter of a mile; for they were of that (to me) trying order of carriage companions who talk about the scenery as you go, as a point of politeness.
But the views were beautiful—“Sketches everywhere!” we cried.
“There’s nothing to make a sketch of round the Vicarage,” we added. “We’ve done the church, with the Deadmanstone Hills behind it, and without the Deadmanstone Hills behind it, till we are sick of the subject.”
So, the weather being fine, and even hot, we provided ourselves with luncheon and sketching materials, and made an expedition to the point we had selected.
We were tired by the time we reached it. This does not necessarily damp one’s sketching ardour, but it is unfavourable to accuracy of outline, and especially so to purity of colouring. However, we did not hesitate. Eleanor went down to her study of birch-trees in the gorge, Clement climbed up the bank to get the most extended view of the Ewden Valley; I contented myself with sitting by the roadside in front of the same view, and Jack stayed with me.
He had come with us. Not that he often went out sketching, but our descriptions of the beauty of the scenery had roused him to make another attempt for the “Household Album.” Seldom lastingly provided, for his own part, with apparatus of any kind, Jack had a genius for purveying all that he required in an emergency. On this occasion he had borrowed Mrs. Arkwright’s paint-box (without leave), and was by no means ill supplied with pencils and brushes which certainly were not his own. He had hastily stripped a couple of sheets from my block whilst I was dressing, and with these materials he seated himself on that side of me which enabled him to dip into my water-pot, and began to paint.
Not half-way through my outline, I was just beginning to realize the complexities of a bird’s-eye view with your middle distance in a valley, and your foreground sloping steeply upwards to your feet, when Jack, washing out a large, dyed sable sky-brush in my pot, with an amount of splashing that savoured of triumph, said: