It is put there on purpose."
Lastly, on an eminence I saw a man like an eagle, sitting facing full the
sun, and upon his glowing canvas was portrayed the heavens above and the
earth beneath and the waters under the earth, and behind him sat one who
patted him upon the back, and looked at intervals over his shoulder at the
glorious work, and then wrote in a book a eulogy thereof; and I, too, came
and looked over the painter's shoulder, and I muttered, with Oliver
Wendell Holmes,
"The foreground golden dirt,
The sunshine painted with a squirt."
Then the man who patted the painter on the back turned upon me
aggressively, and said: "This is the only painter who ever was, or will be,
and if you don't agree with me you are a fool." The painter, smiling a sly
Monna-Lisan smile of triumph, remarked: "Right you are, John. I rather
think this _will_ knock that rascal Claude," and I laughed so that I awoke;
but the memory of the dream remained with me, and it seemed to me that,
perhaps, we poor amateurs might not be any better able to compass aught
but caricatures of this marvellous scenery than the ghostly limners of my
dream!
The hut just above ours was tenanted by a party of three young Lancers on
leave from Rawal Pindi, a gramophone, and a few dogs.
One of the soldiers was laid up with a bad ankle, and it soon became a
daily custom for Jane or me to play a game of chess or piquet with the
invalid.
Later on, when leave had expired for the hale, when the dogs had departed,
and the voice of the gramophone was no more heard in the land, we came to
see a great deal of the wounded warrior, and finally arranged to
personally conduct him off the premises, and return him, in time for
medical survey, to Rawal Pindi.
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