“OUT AFTER NATURE.”

case; and it has been our lot, now and then, to witness some of the rather comical and ludicrous contretemps to which these gentlemen are liable. Some summers back, while out with a friend angling for trout in one of the tributaries of the Conway, said friend called loudly for assistance in landing a prize he had hooked, but which he had not fished for, and which was not a trout, but about a square yard of canvas, with a half-finished landscape upon it. We had hardly succeeded in drawing it ashore, when the owner came pelting along the meadows after it. He had been perched upon a rock in the middle of a stream nearly half the day, busily painting the wooded gorge down which the little streamlet fought its way among the moss and lichen-clad boulders. Unknown to, or unheeded by him, there had occurred a rain-storm higher up in the mountains, and a sudden freshet had rushed down the gorge, filling his boots by way of salute, and barely allowing him time to snatch up his colour-box with one hand, and to swing himself, by the aid of a friendly branch, up the bank with the other. Of course the calamity wound up with a hearty laugh; and we remember renewing the laugh involuntarily on recognising the picture, near twelve months after, on the walls of a London exhibition. Another friend, who will, we trust, excuse us for recording the circumstance, had one of his sketches in water-colour devoured by a goat, almost before his eyes; by way of comment on the deed, he remarked, in a ruefully humorous way, that he was not aware that goats had a taste for art.

A painter of some note sat one evening patiently on the beach. He thought of nothing but his picture, until he heard voices bawling loudly at him from a distance, and, looking round, discovered that his colour-box was voyaging out to sea on the back of the rising tide, that his easel was a foot deep in water, and that he himself, perched on his bit of crag, was islanded by the advancing waves. He gave a doleful glance at his colour-box, saw it tossed up and down for a moment or two, then fill, and founder in the deep; but he seized his picture, and, boldly plunging through the surf, bore it off in safety. This was a capital joke, so good that the artist made capital out of it; for he painted the event in a humorous style, and found a solid reward in the result. These little mishaps of the day form the theme of conversation round the supper-table, when the subjects of them meet together in the evenings; and not a few of them get recorded in entries poetical and pictorial, made in the album usually kept at such places of resort.

The search after the picturesque is not in all cases, however, attended with adventures merely laughable. We knew a sexagenarian sketcher

who, in his hunger for mountain scenery, got lost in the intricacies of the Snowdon range, into which he had ventured without a guide, and who, failing to recover his track, had to pass the night under the lee of a rock, finding no better shelter, and who only escaped the next day to die shortly after from the exposure. Enthusiasm for art is probably as powerful as any other stimulant in urging man "to spurn delights and live laborious days." It is well known that to Turner, when a young man, all hours of the twenty-four were equal and alike; he was ever ready to work, to seize and make a prize of every kind of natural effect; of light and shade, of storm and calm, of flood and conflagration; all of which he seems to have had the faculty of mastering and storing up, so as to be able to reproduce them whenever occasion demanded. It is Ruskin, if we are not mistaken, who tells us of a belated traveller on the Cornish coast who, while bewailing the misfortune that had befallen him, came suddenly upon young Turner, who had risen from his bed in a distant town not long after midnight, and was quietly sitting upon a rugged peak in the darkness, waiting, with his painting materials at his side, to catch and record the first gleam of the pale dawn over the broad Atlantic. Those who would emulate the fame of Turner may gather from this single trait what kind of sacrifices they must make to