in a staccato form (for I cannot talk when I am at work) such information from various guide books telling of the interior of the famous church as I had gleaned the night before.

One paragraph at the bottom of a page came to my mind, upon which I dilated with confidence, our ears at the moment being filled with the sound of an anvil and hammer, reverberating through an open door. The noise came from a shop which seemed to be part and parcel of the edifice itself was a part, so the sexton, or clerk, to whom I appealed told me in passing, adding that it had always been a blacksmith shop, and was still, and would continue to be until the end of time. Indeed, its attempted removal had so seriously endangered the repairs, completed some fifty years before, that the authorities had been compelled to let the shop stay-a confirmation which established me at once as an oracle in my chauffeur's mind.

Evins drank it all in, putting questions now and then, most of which, being outside my line of research, brought me up standing, the very obliging and learned clerk having gone to his luncheon. I could, of course, have invented an answer, and indulged in glittering generalities, which would have satisfied him. I could

have parried the questions; but I did none of these things. I simply threw up my hands. It seemed the only honest way out. It might not have appeared to me in that light the day before, but it did now. Yesterday I was driving around with just a plain chauffeur, number something or other, in a W. & G. taxi. To-day I was the guest, or comrade, or companion, of a man who would have been wearing the D. S. O. had a reporter come along at the right moment and spelt his name correctly in the despatches a man, too, who thought so little of the incident that I had to use a pair of nippers and a force pump to extract from him the slightest detail regarding the occur

rence.

It was now three o'clock, and yet my sketch was still unfinished; for church architecture must be drawn - not guessed at.

The taxi, of course, required neither food or water, but the chauffeur might.

"Getting hungry, Evins?"

"Well, yes, a little peckish, sir. I was up at six but it don't matter; keep on I can stand it if you can."

"I would send you for some sandwiches and a couple of bottles of beer if it wasn't a churchbut of course

"No, of course not, sir. It's bad luck to picnic on a tomb."

"And then again, Evins, I've got a better idea. I'll be through in half an hour, and then we'll drive down Holborn, near Staple Inn, and get a chop and a mug apiece."

"Thank you, sir," and he touched his hat.

All of this happened, even to a second mug apiece, the last accompanied by my cigar case which I sent to his table by the waiter with a duplicate of the afternoon paper I was reading. And so a sort of comradeship was established between us one that, as the days went by, grew closer and more human.

CHAPTER V

STAPLE INN

HE wet streets and sidewalks of London,

THE

glistening under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of quicksilver escaping everywhere, are always a delight to me. When with these I get a background of and I always do - flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the haze of mist and smoke, my delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start your foreground say a figure, or umbrella, or a cab with a stroke of jet black, and the perspective instantly fades into grays of steeple, dome or roof, so delicate and vapoury that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky.

And charcoal is again the one only medium which will express it. Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal, the individual medium. No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes, nor mixing of tints; no

scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a small pocket pencil, held flat between the thumb and forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let go." Yes, one thing more - care must be taken to have this thumb and forefinger fastened to a sure, knowing and fearless hand, worked by an arm which plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm, kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge such as composition drawing, mass, and light and shade is then turned on.

Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal sketch, covering and containing all a man can see and he should neither record nor explain anything more is not completely finished in three hours, it can never be finished by the same man in three days or three years.

And London is the best place I know for practising the art — especially if it be raining, and there was no question that it was raining on this particular morning in Holborn, when Evins backed his taxi into a position from