discovering, when he tried to look at a picture, that
he was standing in front of some one, and had
to skip out of the way incessantly on this account?
Why was that poor little girl brought
here? She changes the leg she is standing on
continually, and leans upon railings, and sits
upon edges of chairs, and looks so weary, and
when they ask her, " Are you tired, dear?" says,
resignedly, "A little." The sight of that child's
torments reminded the Eye-witness of some that
he had himself gone through in early years, in
galleries full of pictures by the old masters.

There is little going on in the way of conversation
in those rooms, and what there is, is seldom
about the pictures. One conversation
which the Eye-witness listened to seemed,
from the frequent allusion to a " quarter of a
pound of beef-suet" which occurred in its
course, to be rather on matters connected with
cookery than art. But the sound most commonly
heard in these halls was the echoing and
re-echoing of weary and protracted yawns those
yawns, more indicative of hopeless exhaustion
than any other, which end in three or four
supplementary brays of weariness. There were,
indeed, on the occasion of the last visit of
your Eye-witness to the National Gallery, two
persons present whose conversation, or rather
that of one of them, for the other rarely spoke,
was upon subjects connected with the place.
Of these two individuals, one, who was
considerably older than his companion, seemed
to have brought his young friend to the National
Gallery to torment him. They were
both in a class of life in which much Art-education
was not to be expected, but the younger
man was evidently especially in the dark in such
matters, and was ensnared into mistakes, and
lured on to ruin, by his senior, in a cruel and
inhuman manner. The tormentor—the greasiness
of whose coat and cap were not to be accounted
for by any trade that human beings follow—
would halt before a picture, and, with a malicious
grin, would inquire of his young friend what it
appeared to him to represent? As it evidently
represented nothing to the young friend, the
young friend said nothing.

"Do you see the pictur'?" asks the greasy
man.

"Yes," replies the other, sulkily.

"Well, what do you see when you look at
it?" It is a Dutch picture, the reader must
know, of a girl scraping parsnips, with a child
by her side watching her. " What do you see
when you look at it?"

No answer.

"Is it a mermaid standing on her head and
playing on the pianner with her tail?" asks the
tormentor, ironically.

No answer.

"Is it a line-of-battle-ship in action, with
the coast of France in the distance?"

The young man stares stolidly before him, but
makes no response, and he of the greasy coat
lapses from sarcasm into open censure.

"Now what's the use," says the greasy man
"of your coming here if you won't use your
mind? What's the use," he continues, looking
round on the company who are assembled about
him, as they always are round anybody who
will hold forth: " what's the use of a young
man coining here if he doesn't understand what
he sees? This here, George, is a pictur' of a
old woman mending a pen for the little boy to
write his copy with. And so you might have
seen, George, if you had used the imagination
that natur' has supplied you with."

BLACK TARN.

IN THREE PORTIONS. CHAPTER IV.

LAURENCE had been married nearly a year;
and it had been a year of unmitigated misery
to him. Every day added to the alienation,
and every day developed some new unloveliness
in Annie. There was no pretence, now, of
even good-will between them, and Laurence
had already begun to speculate on the best
manner of their separation. Annie took no
pains to conceal her temper: he, none to conceal
his disgust; she distinctly declined to help him
in his embarrassments: he, as distinctly told
her that this was his only reason for marrying
her, and that, if it failed, she was nothing but
an encumbrance. So things went very badly
at Grantley Hall, and only wrath and enmity
reigned between the miserable pair.

One day, a cold, wretched winter's day, when
the snow came down in angry gusts, and
the wind howled heavily through the leafless
trees, Annie sat by the window, watching the
torpid creatures in her aquarium. Laurence,
flushed and agitated, looked wistfully over the
wide acres, held now by precarious bonds, but
which were so dear to the proud heart of this
Last of the Grantleys, as he was fond of calling
himself. He was hard pressed by his creditors,
and he had been again urging the
matter of the loan; but impatiently, trying to
get by force what he could not obtain by
gentleness, and unwisely reiterating his insulting
reasons for ever having connected himself
with her. Annie, quite silent, took not the
slightest notice of him; she was intent on
poking the actiniæ and holothuria with a long
glass tube.

At last, she did look up, and her eyes fell
upon the distant figure of Mr. Clarke Jones,
galloping up the drive. Mr. Jones was, by
original design of nature, a horse-jockey, and
prided himself on his thorough-bred mare.

"Mr. Clarke Jones comes here much too
often," said Annie, abruptly interrupting her
husband in the middle of one of his speeches.

"I suppose I may choose my own men of
business."

"I suppose you may; but he comes here too
often."

"Why don't you turn him out, then?" said
Laurence, with a—laugh not at all a pleasant one.
"You have contrived to turn out every one you
did not like."

"Not every one," said Annie, imperturbably;
"not Mr. Jones."