“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.”