' AMARYLLIS AT THE FAIR ' 281 



rest black guilt or folly.' Alere's shaking hands could 

 ' draw delicate lines without a flaw ' (as Fred Gyde drew 

 Day House Farm). He made designs for bindings, did 

 some of the tooling himself, drew and engraved, and helped 

 in the printing-house in Fleet Street. He had drawers 

 full of unsorted sketches, landscapes, flowers, studies from 

 the nude. His studio was a plain, not very old room, 

 with no gauntlets and breastplates, Turkish guns, no 

 ' properties,' but books everywhere, and music, ' for 

 Flamma was fond of his many-keyed flute.' He could 

 not get out of Fleet Street. There he lived and worked, 

 and ' he could stop when he liked and take a swig of stout.' 

 He did as he chose, not as bidden ; and so made little 

 money, and only a little fame. 



' Alere liked pulling off the proofs in his shirt-sleeves, 

 swigging his stout, smoking on the sly, working with all 

 the genius of an inspired mechanic one moment and 

 dropping into absolute idleness the next, spending infinite 

 pains in finishing one bit of work, as if his very life 

 depended on the smoothing of an edge of paper, putting 

 off the next till the end of the month, pottering, sleeping, 

 gossiping, dreaming over old German works, and especially 

 dreaming over Goethe, humming old German songs — 

 for he had been a great traveller — sometimes scrawling 

 a furious Mazzinian onslaught in a semi-Nihilist foreign 

 print, collecting stray engravings, wandering hither and 

 thither. 



' Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, con- 

 noisseur, traveller, printer, republican, conspirator, sot, 

 smoker, dreamer, poet, kind-hearted, good-natured, 

 prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street, carpet-bag man, 

 gentleman shaken to pieces. 



' He worked in his shirt-sleeves and drank stout, but 

 nothing vulgar had ever been recorded against Alere 

 Flamma. He frequented strong company — very strong 

 meat — but no vile word left his lips.' * 



Jefferies is almost envious of this so different life. He 



* Amaryllis at the Fair. 



