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the time it generally takes for a bankrupt, or a private-liquidation man, to have his affairs arranged. The blinds are generally drawn fully downnot necessarily from any death within, but simply because there is very little furniture in the rooms.

No jury would convict a man of murder who pleaded in defence he had lived in Jerryville six months before the perpetration of the deed— "Justifiable homicide" would be the only possible verdict under the

circumstances.

I can conceive nothing more probable than the following results if I were to reside here for-say three months at one time :

I should, after a week or two's sojourn, lie in wait behind a hedge provided with a good supply of bricks-a common commodity in Jerryville-and when I saw an unprotected child of tender years passing pounce out, dash out his brains with a brick; and then conceal his remains in the nearest house, this would be the work of a moment.

If I went to church (an improbable event however) when the plate came round I should à la "the good young man who died, my friends," put in a (bad) sixpence, and take out a (good) "bob." During the sermon I should whistle audibly "We are a merry family," or some other very secular air.

I should take a fiendish delight in tripping up blind and infirm old people, and then politely proceed to ask them "where are you a shoving to?"

These, and other kindred pursuits would be the inevitable outcome of a short stay in this cheerful and salubrious locality.

There are one or two shops in Jerryville, these sell such articles as even its degraded inhabitants find it difficult to do without, such as red herrings, coal, and grand pianos.

I need hardly say there is no pawnbroker's establishment here; the inhabitants would be very glad of "uncle's" assistance, but unfortunately they have nothing to pledge.

Such are the principal features of unlovely Jerryville-this sham and mockery of a town-and a place more disgraceful to our boasted civilisation it would be difficult to discover. Instead of comfort, solidity and beauty, we find only pretence, flimsiness, and tawdry vulgarity. No Syrian village, with its vermin-covered, ragged, backsheesh demanding inhabitants, but can show more substantial and genuine dwellings; these, though but of mud, are after a fashion habitable, they have lasted hundreds of years, and will some of them be in existence long after the fragile creations of the jerry builder have crumbled away and altogether disappeared.

I should not omit to mention there is a west end even in Jerryville, for not far from the railway station are to be found a few houses occupied by the élite of the vicinity; these last are fairly habitable and-barring a general tendency on the part of each gate post to lean affectionately towards its vis-à-vis, and a few rather alarming fissures in the walls, such as are common in houses out Tipton or Wednesbury wayare almost respectable. Some faint attempts at art are displayed here, chiefly in the way of stained glass borders to the windows, but as the

colours are invariably of glaring blue, red, or yellow, without pattern of any kind-for that would cost money-the effect is not very pleasing to the stranger.

Jerryville is not altogether bad, a certain halo of culture and refinement is just at this moment resting upon its precincts—a real live poet has made a home here. Perhaps the last thing one would associate with this place would be poetry of any kind, but in spite of unfavourable and dismal surroundings, the divine muse has, if indeed no shrine, at least an ardent and fervent votary to do her honour

A Mr. Higgs has produced, so I learn from advertisements recently in our newspapers, a very original poem, bearing title "The Vicar of Wakefield (by Oliver Goldsmith), reproduced in rhyme." Not having seen this modest production of Jerryville's poet-laureate I know not its merits, but, for splendid audacity, not to say impudence, this gentleman should bear the palm against all competitors. We await with fear and trembling the next astounding proof of his genius and versatile originality. There being but one road into Jerryville it follows, perforce, that by that same way the visitor must depart; a few strangers, however, feeling that anything were preferable to gazing once more upon this "chamber of horrors," are in the habit of leaping a ditch or two, rushing up the railway bank that forms one of the natural boundaries of the place, and then are seen to flee across the line, and down into a labyrinth of narrow and unknown lanes. A violent death beneath the wheels of a locomotive engine has no terrors for them to equal the going back through Jerryville's haunted roads.

Perhaps some day, when our great men can spare a little time from the burning questions of the day; when Egypt, and even Ireland, cease to monopolise all their energies, they will look into this matter of jerry or dishonest building, and endeavour, by stringent laws and heavy penalties, to prevent and deter unprincipled rogues from erecting sham habitations for their fellow men to dwell in, making their lives more unlovely, wretched and degraded than they need to be.

It should be made impossible for an inoffensive and innocent being to be able to distinctly hear a match struck, a door slam, or a conjugal misunderstanding some five or six doors away; and it ought to be possible for him to drive a nail in on his side of the wall without knocking out those in his neighbour's. To rich and well-to-do people this matters not; they can choose well-built and substantial homes. But there are thousands who cannot do so, these must take what is offered them without option.

These hopes and desires are only Utopian, I fear, and not destined to be realised very soon, and so, pending the arrival of the milennium, we must wait patiently for that good time which, although long delayed will come at last.

W. H. T.

THE POOR ARTIST.

I AM a poor, alas in every sense of the word a poor artist. My friends, for I have never yet been sufficiently successful to acquire enemies, say so freely; and if not in my hearing, yet so that I can hear of it with abundant frequency. And indeed the prices which I can obtain for my work sufficiently prove that, whether my friends are correct in their estimate of my powers or not, they are on the side of the majority, which, as things go now, is as near to truth as most people trouble to get themselves. But I am a poor painter, and a painter much to be pitied, in a sense they hardly take into their account. Is it not a valid cause for pity to be for ever aiming at a mark you can never hit; to have a mistress so lovely that you cannot leave her, and so perfect that you know full-well you can never reach her;-to fail so completely to realise your own objects and to express your own meanings that the contempt of the world seems but a feeble and broken reflection of your own self-scorn? This is my lot, and it is a pitiable one surely. I see around me ap infinite and immeasurable world of beauty, and the more clearly its beauty becomes apparent to me the more does it mock and tantalise my limping efforts to catch the simplest of its charms. Is it worth my while to describe how the fleeting mists elude my clumsy touch; how the clouds as they sail onward so silently, shift, and melt, and blend, and gather, till my closest copy of even their shape has to end in impudent guess-work? Need I tell how, when after a day of storm the setting sun reaching some rift in the flying cloud-rack, suddenly pours back to the very zenith one flood of molten gold and liquid ruby, I have to lay down my poor sham colours in despair? Why the very daisies mock me. Their simplicity is after all a star of virgin silver radiating from a boss of immaculate gold. I imitate them with little splashes of white paint diversified with dubious specks of yellow; and when I see the copy I have made, Heaven knows with utmost care,-I am a poor artist; and I fancy that so far we are all poor artists if we were to tell the truth, except some few who, having become persuaded that the beauty lies in them and not in nature, are quite happy and contented. Finally, I am poor in that very common and matter-of-fact sense which a well taught and philosophical mind would regard as a quite unimportant accident of humanity,-provided it only happened to other people; but which, not unnaturally, makes itself felt

the more keenly the closer it comes. For this misfortune my friends have been so good as to discover several causes, some of which their advice ought certainly to be able to remedy, since it was their imagination which created them. Other remedies I have taken pains to search out in the writings of the philosophers and moralists (so visionary and unpractical a being is an artist); but I have found none very applicable to my case. Sometimes a man is so free, or so healthy, or so inured to it, that he does not feel his poverty at all, and in this case a suit of philosophical contentment is cheap and easy wear; but when a man has given hostages to fortune in the shape of a wife and many little children, and has moreover been placed by providence in the midst of civilisation with all its exigencies, I am of opinion that for the disease of poverty he will find one only anodyne, sleep; and one only remedy, gold.

True to those personal reminiscences which are evidently in danger of becoming vulgar, and for which I can only apologise on the ground that they bring me to my story; destined to settle I hope for ever the point upon which my friends are always harping, namely, that I might have been well enough to do had I liked, but that the fault is my own. So it is, although not just in the way they are kind enough to imagine. I might have been rich; and if I am not so it is my own--fault ? you shall judge.

Well,

I was sitting in my studio, idle enough and sad enough. It was scarcely dark, but the daylight by which alone a painter can work was waning, and there had come over me one of those fits of depression in which a man doubts whether it be any good to work at all. Just there, and just then, it was too true that I could turn my eyes no way but they must light on marks of failure and disappointment. The two canvasses which I had placed, with perhaps pardonable vanity, in the position where they would most readily strike the eye, had been accepted at the Academy, and had really been fairly well hung. But it is easier for an unknown man even to get two pictures accepted at the Royal Academy than to get them noticed when they are there. I might say something cutting perhaps, if I took time, about the fairness of the critics and the judgment of the public. To what purpose? No one had robbed me, no one abused me. Here are my pictures back again, safe and sound;-uninjured, uncriticised, and alas! unsold. There are a score more scattered about, they come from various provincial exhibitions, some from more than one. Trade has been very bad, and pictures are luxuries easily dispensed with; it is needless to work out the sum in twenty different ways when the result is always the same. There is the portrait too which Lady Giles Gotham so absolutely refused on account of the complexion not being that which, for aught I know, hers may have been twenty years ago. Her ladyship's complexion is too well-known to her friends to admit of much sophistication, and is assuredly none of my fault. What was I to do? To write her down a Hebe, and myself an ass, by the same falsehood; or to bow her ladyship out with moody politeness and turn back to wonder whether it had ever occurred to her that canvas and paints were not supplied to modern artists on the same terms as manna to the ancient Israelites?

There were others, and there was the recollection of others still, sold perforce to dealers at prices which had led me to suppose that they imagined "plumber and glazier" to form also portions of my description in the directory. But there was nowhere, that I could see, turn myself as I would, any hope, any prospect of that appreciation to which the honest worker may lawfully aspire, any distant possibility of that fame of which he may innocently dream, nay, any expectation of deliverance from that carking care which while it aggravates the claims upon one's brain, minimises at the same time one's power to think. A dreary prospect-interrupted by a slight tap upon my studio door, and by the entrance of a stranger who, with a slight bow and some commonplace request, as I understood it, that I would not disturb myself, proceeded coolly to examine my far too extensive stock in hand. What between those who, having a will of their own, care nothing for appearances; and those who, having no will of their own, are all the more obliged to put on the appearance of one-picture buyers are proverbially eccentric. My visitor's brusque manners caused me therefore little surprise, but his proceedings might well have excited curiosity in one more busily occupied than I was at that moment. He had deprecated interference by a tacit motion of his hand, and I had full leisure for observation in my turn as he flitted from one to another of my luckless canvasses, now directing his attention apparently to the frame of such as were graced with frames, now scrutinising the signature, now turning a picture edgeways to the light as though his object had been to ascertain the thickness of the layers of paint; but never, never once, looking at a picture as a man would have looked who cared neither for names or processes, but who simply desired to find work sincerely meant and worthily executed. As for his face, that was rarely turned towards me, and so rapid and erratic were his movements that the few glimpses I obtained of it conveyed no impression beyond that of extreme littleness mingled with mediocre acuteness. He might have served for the very personification of a picture dealer who had gone into the business just as he might have gone into those of the Free-Thought Lecturer, Irish Home Ruler, or Electric Light Company Promoter; simply because for the moment it paid, or at all events brought notoriety-which is the means by which the astute initiated advertise gratis. Such a physiognomy was obviously too common to excite much attention, and although my strange visitor's dress was of an ultra-æstheticism which must have elicited free comment in the street, it was not remarkable in the studio of an artist, whose experience must long since have prepared him for anything and everything short of common honesty and common sense. Still it was really irritating to see even the most ordinary of mortals fluttering about like an insane artificial butterfly; and it is small blame I think to my overstrained courtesy if, when after an examination of my works at once protracted and flippant he at length turned towards me, I greeted my visitor with the abrupt enquiry

"What are you?"

"What am I?" said he complacently, and as though somewhat astonished that such a question should be put to him, "I am ART."

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