“A very decent critic, your alcoholic friend,” the Critic remarked.  “He was full of good ideas, as you shall see,” the story-teller replied.  “I quite agree with you, if the bad whisky could have been kept away from him he might have shone in your profession.  Anyhow, he had the makings of an honest man in him, and when the Vulcan enlarged its cliff-painting programme, he cut loose bravely.  Then followed ten lean years of odd jobs, with landscape painting as a recreation, and the occasional sale of a canvas on a street corner as a great event.  When his need was greatest he consented to earn good wages composing symbolical door designs for the Meteor Coach Company, but that again he could not endure for long.  Later in the intervals of colouring photographs, illuminating window-shades, or whatever came to hand, he worked out the theory which finally led him to the feet of Corot.  It was, in short, that the proper subject for an artist deficient in linear design is sunrise.

“He explained the matter to me with zest.  ’By morning you’ve half forgotten the look of things.  All night you’ve seen only dreams that don’t have any true form, and when the first light comes, nothing shows solid for what it is.  The mist uncovers a little here and there, and you wonder what’s beneath.  It’s all guesswork and nothing sure.  Take any morning early when I look out of my attic window to the North River.  There’s nothing but a heap of fog, grey or pink, as there’s more or less sun behind.  It gets a little thick over toward Jersey, and that may be the shore, or again it mayn’t.  Then a solid bit of vi’let shows high up, and I guess it’s Castle Stevens, but perhaps it ain’t.  Then a pale-yellow streak shoots across the river farther up and I take it to be the Palisades, but again it may be jest a ray of sunshine.  You see there really ain’t no earth; it’s all air and light.  That’s what a man that can’t drore ought to paint; that’s what my namesake, Cameel Corot, did paint better than any one that ever lived.’

“At this point of his confession John Campbell glared savagely at me for assent, and set down a sadly frayed and noxious stogy on Nickerson’s black walnut.  I hastened to agree, though much of the doctrine was heresy to a realist, only objecting:  ’But one really has to draw a scene such as you describe just like any other.  In fact, the drawing of atmosphere is the most difficult branch of our art.  Many very good painters, like my master, Courbet, have given it up.’  ‘Corbet!’ he replied contemptuously; ’he didn’t give it up; he never even seen it.  But don’t I know it’s hard, sir?  For years I tried to paint it, and I never got nothing but the fog; when I put in more I lost that.  They’re pretty, those sketches—­like watered silk or the scum in the docks with the sun on it; but, Lord, there ain’t nothing into ’em, and that’s the truth.  At last, after fumbling around for years, I happened to walk into Vogler’s gallery one day and saw my first Corot.  Ther’ it