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FROM HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
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Early on a fine summer morning, an old man was walking on the road between Brussels and Namur. He expected a friend to arrive by the diligence, and he set out some time before it was due, to meet it on the road. Having a good deal of time to spare, he amused himself by watching any object of interest that caught his eye; and at length stopped to inspect the operations of a painter, who, mounted on a ladder placed against the front of a wayside inn, was busily employed in depicting a sign suitable to its name, “The Rising Sun.”
“Here,” said the old man to himself, “is an honest dauber, who knows as much of perspective as a cart-horse; and who, I’ll warrant, fancies himself a Rubens. How he brushes in that ultramarine sky!”
The critic then commenced walking backward and forward before the inn, thinking that he might as well loiter there for the diligence as walk on farther. The painter, meantime, continued to lay on fresh coats of the brightest blue, which appeared to aggravate the old gentleman very much. At length, when the sign-painter took another brush full of blue paint to plaster on, the spectator could endure it no longer, and exclaimed severely—
“Too much blue!”
The honest painter looked down from his perch, and said, in that tone of forced calmness which an angry man sometimes assumes:
“Monsieur does not perceive that I am painting a sky?”
“Oh, yes, I see very well, you are trying to paint a sky, but I tell you again there is too much blue.”