Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,—­a circular cloak of it, so to say.  We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one’s legs, owned by my Lady H——­’s gardener, and elegantly named “Ethel Cottage,” as a stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness.  We should have preferred accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across the road.  But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other than Hobson’s choice:  the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken, and we must e’en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where artists were not and Ethel Cottages as yet unknown.

But where, tell me where, are not artists in England?  And where, tell me where, do artists gather in squads that Ethel Cottages do not spring up like the tents of an army with banners?  For even painters must eat and be lodged, the aboriginal habitations are not of elastic capacity, the inns are of feeble digestion, and the third summer of an artistic invasion is sure to find “Ethels” and “Mabels” in red brick and stunning whitewash, and, like our row of laborers’ cottages, cursed by artists, but inhabited by them.

It was a soulagement of our aesthetic discomfort that so long as we remained hidden within it we never realized our own hideousness.  Now and then we saw the ugly squareness of our afternoon shadow upon our aristocratically-gravelled front yard, but ordinarily we saw only dreamy distances melting into piny duskiness against the far-off sky, the serpent-like windings of the tranquil river, upon which its navy looked like dust-motes, fair fields of golden grain, and the farm-houses and cottages which looked upon our blank brickness with admiration and wondered why we were despised of our less beautifully housed kind, when our forks were four-pronged and of silvery seeming and our floors carpeted to our sybaritic feet.  It was only when we returned to our Ethel after long tramps over the country-side, from a four-miles-distant Norman tower or a ten-miles-away pre-Reformation abbey, now stable or granary, that we figuratively beat our breasts and tore our hair because Fate had not made us real tramps, privileged to sleep in pre-Reformation stables or ’neath pre-Reformation stars, rather than the imitation tramps we were, wedded to the habits but loathing the aspect of red-faced, staring Ethels.