...  There is a very beautiful old gun in the Arsenal upon a gun-carriage with wheels thus [Sketch], and with bas-reliefs of St. Paul and the Viper.  It is needless to say the gun came from the island called Melita!  But for cunning workmanship and fine bold designs and delicate execution the Chinese guns are the ones!  I am taking rubbings of the patterns for decorative purposes!  They were taken in the war.

There is yet one picture I must tell you of—­“A Musical Story by Chopin”—­the boy playing to a group of lads and a tutor.  His utterly absorbed face is admirable.  It is a very pretty thing.  Not marvellous, but very good.

August 5, 1879.

* * * * *

I must tell you that it is on the cards that Caldecott is going to do a coloured picture for me to write to, for the October No. of A.J.M. (so that it will bind up with the 1879 volume and be the Frontispiece).  He is so fragile he can’t “hustle,” but he wants to do it.  D——­ and he became great friends in London, and I think now he would help us whenever he could.  We have been bold enough to “speak our minds” pretty freely to him, about wasting his time over second-rate “society” work for Graphic, etc., etc., when he has such a genius to interpret humour and pathos for good writers, and no real writing gifts himself. (He has done some things called Flirtation in France, supplying both letter-press and sketches!—­that are terrible to any one who has gone heart and soul into his House that Jack built!!!) I’ve told him frankly if he “draws down to me” in the hopes of making my share easy by making his commonplace, and gives me a “rising young family in sand-boots and frilled trousers with an over-fed mercantile mamma,” my “few brains will utterly congeal,” but I have made two suggestions to him, so closely on his own lines that if hints help him I think he would find it easy.  You know horses are really his specialite.  I have asked him to give me a coloured thing and one or two rough sketches, Either

An Old Coaching Day’s Idyll
or—­A Trooper’s Tragedy.

The same beginning for either: 

Child learning to ride on
                      hobby-horse
                      rocking-horse
                      donkey
                      pony
                  etc. etc.

Then (if coaching) an old haunted-looking posting-house on a coaching road (Hog’s Back!)—­a highwayman—­a broken-down postilion—­a girl on a pillion, etc., etc.

Or, if military: 

A yokel watching a cavalry regiment in Autumn Manoeuvres over a bridge.

A Horse and Trooper—­Riding for life (here or Hereafter!) with another man across his saddle.

Of course it may only hamper him to have hints (I’ve not heard yet), but I hope anyhow he’ll do something for me.