Luckily, those who painted my gallery were born before man.  Therefore, my pictures, instead of being boxed up by lumbering bars of gold, are disposed generously between latitudes, equinoxes, monsoons, and the like, and, making all allowance for an owner’s partiality, they are really not so bad.

’Down in the South where the ships never go’—­between the heel of New Zealand and the South Pole, there is a sea-piece showing a steamer trying to come round in the trough of a big beam sea.  The wet light of the day’s end comes more from the water than the sky, and the waves are colourless through the haze of the rain, all but two or three blind sea-horses swinging out of the mist on the ship’s dripping weather side.  A lamp is lighted in the wheel-house; so one patch of yellow light falls on the green-painted pistons of the steering gear as they snatch up the rudder-chains.  A big sea has got home.  Her stern flies up in the lather of a freed screw, and her deck from poop to the break of the foc’s’le goes under in gray-green water level as a mill-race except where it spouts up above the donkey-engine and the stored derrick-booms.  Forward there is nothing but this glare; aft, the interrupted wake drives far to leeward, a cut kite-string dropped across the seas.  The sole thing that has any rest in the turmoil is the jewelled, unwinking eye of an albatross, who is beating across wind leisurely and unconcerned, almost within hand’s touch.  It is the monstrous egotism of that eye that makes the picture.  By all the rules of art there should be a lighthouse or a harbour pier in the background to show that everything will end happily.  But there is not, and the red eye does not care whether the thing beneath its still wings stays or staves.

The sister-panel hangs in the Indian Ocean and tells a story, but is none the worse for that.  Here you have hot tropical sunlight and a foreshore clothed in stately palms running out into a still and steamy sea burnished steel blue.  Along the foreshore, questing as a wounded beast quests for lair, hurries a loaded steamer never built for speed.  Consequently, she tears and threshes the water to pieces, and piles it under her nose and cannot put it under her cleanly.  Coir-coloured cargo bales are stacked round both masts, and her decks are crammed and double-crammed with dark-skinned passengers—­from the foc’s’le where they interfere with the crew to the stern where they hamper the wheel.

The funnel is painted blue on yellow, giving her a holiday air, a little out of keeping with the yellow and black cholera flag at her main.  She dare not stop; she must not communicate with any one.  There are leprous streaks of lime-wash trickling down her plates for a sign of this.  So she threshes on down the glorious coast, she and her swarming passengers, with the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday eating out her heart.