THE GARDENERS DREAM. 11 



sedentary " spink." All English sports and games 

 I have loved and love, and yet they satisfied not my 

 present need. " Give me," I cried, " something more 

 continuous than these something which may occupy 

 the thoughts, and employ the actions of my leisure, 

 not in summer only, as cricket, not in winter only, as 

 the chase, hut alike in every season of the year ; and, 

 more than this, through all the different phases of my 

 life youth, manhood, and old age." 



Whereupon, and as in a dissolving view, the whole 

 scene faded from my sight, and in its place appeared 

 before me another semblance of a man. He wore a 

 loose picturesque costume of velvet, and had a 

 pleasant, handsome, intellectual presence, despite a 

 superfluity of hair, which showed that the proprietor 

 was not enrolled in Mr. Truefitt's " Toilette Club." 

 "Essay," he said, " some nobler exercise, worthier 

 the mind of man. Try painting try ' the art which 

 baffles Time's tyrannic sway,' which lives exultingly 

 in a glorious world of its own, which, lodging in an 

 attic, and looking out on a London fog, can surround 

 itself with the magnificence of a palace, and the 

 scenery of an Italian lake. Or try music music, 

 which evokes the heroism, exalts the piety, and 

 soothes the sorrows of mankind." 



" Alas ! " I replied, " I have tried and failed : and 

 you might as well essay to teach a boot-jack chemistry, 

 or listen for a symphony from your garden roller, as 

 tell a man to be an artist. Art is not precisely what 

 the old lady thought it was, when she asked the son 

 of Cauova ' whether he meant to carry on his father's 

 business ? ' It is indigenous to the soil in which it 



