' And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your
friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide
shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring
sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of
another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch
your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk
beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip
through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the
trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of
light. But you know it is going forward; and, out of emulation
with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the
colour for a woodland scene in words.
Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.
All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands
out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained
into its highest key. The boulders are some of them upright and
dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping
cattle. The junipers--looking, in their soiled and ragged
mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the
place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain--
are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
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