The three friends were sauntering one day in Milverton’s garden, all feeling much overwrought and very stupid.  Ellesmere proposed that for a little recreation they should go abroad.  Milverton pleads his old horror of picture-galleries, and declares himself content with the unpainted pictures he has in his mind:—­

It is curious, but I have been painting two companion pictures ever since we have been walking about in the garden.  One consists of some dilapidated garden architecture, with overgrown foliage of all kinds, not forest foliage, but that of rare trees such as the Sumach and Japan-cedar, which should have been neglected for thirty years.  Here and there, instead of the exquisite parterre, there should be some miserable patches of potatoes and beans, and some squalid clothes hung out to dry.  Two ill-dressed children, but of delicate features, should be playing about an ugly neglected pool that had once been the basin to the fountain.  But the foliage should be the chief thing, gaunt, grotesque, rare, beautiful, like an unkempt, uncared-for, lovely mountain girl.  Underneath this picture:—­’Property in the country, in chancery.’

The companion picture, of course, should be:—­’Property in town, in chancery.’  It should consist of two orthree hideous, sordid, window-broken, rat-deserted, paintless, blackened houses, that should look as if they had once been too good company for the neighbourhood, and had met with a fall in life, not deplored by any one.  At the opposite corner should be a flaunting new gin-palace.  I do not know whether I should have the heart to bring any children there, but I would if I could.

The reader will discern that the author of Friends in Council has lost nothing of his power of picturesque description, and nothing of his horror of the abuses and cruelties of the law.  And the passage may serve to remind of the touching, graphic account of the country residence of a reduced family in the Companions of my Solitude. [Footnote:  Chap. iv.] Ellesmere assures Milverton that he shall not be asked to see a single picture; and that if Milverton will bring Blanche and Mildred with him, he will himself go and see seven of the chief sewers in seven of the chief towns.  The appeal to the sanitarian’s feelings is successful; the bargain is struck; and we next find the entire party sauntering, after an early German dinner, on the terrace of some small town on the Rhine,—­Dunsford forgets which.  Milverton, Ellesmere, and Mr. Midhurst arc smoking, and we commend their conversation on the soothing power of tobacco to the attention of the Dean of Carlisle.  Dean Close, by a bold figure, calls tobacco a ‘gorging fiend.’  Milverton holds that smoking is perhaps the greatest blessing that we owe to the discovery of America.  He regards its value as abiding in its power to soothe under the vexations and troubles of life.  While smoking, you cease to live almost wholly in the future, which miserable men for the most part do.  The question