Don’t think you have all the picturesque beggars to yourself!  Out in a street of Woolwich with Mrs. O’Malley the other day I saw this—­[Sketch.] The eyes though very clear and intense-looking decided me at once the man was blind, though he had no dog, and was only walking solemnly on, with a carved fiddle of white wood under his arm!  I ran back after him, and went close in front of him.  He gazed and saw nothing.  Then I touched him and said, “Are you blind?” He started and said, “Very nearly.”  I gave him a penny, for which he thanked me, and then I asked about the fiddle.  He carved and made it himself out of firewood in the workhouse!  The handle part (forgive my barbarism!) is “a bit of ash.”  It was much about the level of North American Indian art, but very touching as to patient ingenuity.  He asked if anybody had told me about him.  I said, “No.  But I’ve a husband who plays the fiddle,” and I gave him the balance of my loose coppers!  He said, “Have you?  He plays, does he?  Well.  This has been a lucky day for me.”  He was a shipwright—­can play the piano, he says—­lives in the workhouse in winter and comes out in summer—­with the flowers—­and his fiddle!  I knew you would like me to give something to that povero fratello.

Woolwich. June 6, 1879.

... The painter of the Academy this year is Mrs. Butler!!  I do hope some day somewhere you may see The Remnants of an Army and Recruits for the Connaught Rangers.  The first is in the Academy Notes, which I send you.  The second is at least as fine. [Sketch.] The landscape effect is the opal-like sky and bright light full of moisture after rain—­heavy clouds hang above—­the mountains are a leaden blue—­and the sky of all exquisite pale shades of bright colour.  Down the wet moor road comes the group.  Two very tall, dark-eyed Connaught “boys”—­one with a set face and his hands in his pockets looking straight out of the picture—­the other with a yearning of Keltic emotion looking back at the hills as if his heart was breaking.  The strapping young sergeant looks very grave; but an “old soldier” behind is lighting his pipe, and a bugler is holding back a dog.  One of the best faces is that of the drummer who walks first, and whose 13-year-old face is so furrowed about the brow with oppressive anxiety—­very truthful!

The Remnants of an Army is of course overpowering by the mere subject, and it is nobly painted.  The man and his horse are wonderful alike.  There is nothing to touch these two.  But I would like to steal Peter Graham’s The Seabirds’ Resting-Place.  Such penguins sitting on wet rocks with wet Fucus growing on them!  Such myriads more in the sea-mist that hides the horizon-line—­sitting on distant rocks!—­and such green waves—­by the light of a sunbeam into one of which you see Laminaria fronds and lumps of Fucus tossing up and down.  You feel wet and ozoney to come near it!  There are some very fine men’s portraits, and Orchardson’s Gamblers Hard Hit is the best thing of his, I think, that I know....