COLOURED CHALKS. 157 



factured for him, upon condition of his purchasing a 

 sufficient quantity to ensure a profit upon the whole. 

 And a few, but very few were selected from those 

 already in stock. By degrees, he added considerably to 

 the number of different shades which he employed, and 

 in his boxes I find three shades of red, three of blue, 

 two of green, three of yellow, an ochre, a brown, and a 

 neutral tint, all of which have clearly been used upon 

 several occasions. 



These he used with wonderful discrimination and 

 judgment, seeming to know by a kind of instinct just 

 how and where to apply the colours so that they might 

 produce the desired result at a distance. He had, 

 indeed, something of the. peculiar art of the scene- 

 painter, whose productions, when viewed at close 

 quarters, appear but the coarsest and clumsiest daubs, 

 but when seen from some thirty or forty feet away are 

 really elegant pictures. As one stood upon the plat- 

 form, quite close to the screen, it was sometimes almost 

 impossible to realise that these were the famous draw- 

 ings, which had made the success of the sketch-lectures. 

 But, upon going down to the middle of the hall, and 

 then viewing the self-same sketches, one's wonder ceased, 

 for now one saw them as they were intended to be seen, 

 and as they were seen in the mind's eye of the lecturer. 



This aptitude for drawing was quite a natural gift, 

 for my father never had a drawing- lesson in his life, and 

 was entirely his own pupil. During his university 

 career he showed a good deal of artistic talent in the 

 production of a number of small pen-and-ink sketches 



