Ruskin himself has told us how years ago poor Turner at his father's house sat in a corner murmuring to himself 'Soapsuds and whitewash,' again and again. 'At last,' says Ruskin, 'I went to him, asking him why he minded what they said. Then he burst out, "Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea is like? I wish they had been in it!"

Ruskin might have remembered this incident before he fell foul of the 'Rocket at Cremorne.'

The details of the trial are well reported in Pennell's Life of Whistler, and the artist printed his own inimitable account of the proceedings. The result was a farthing damages, and Baron Huddlestone ordered each party to pay their own costs. Ruskin's admirers subscribed his costs, and Whistler wrote to his solicitors suggesting that he too should have a subscription, adding with undiminished humor, 'and in the event of a subscription I would willingly contribute my mite.'

Ruskin, who was in broken health, took the verdict very seriously, and wrote to Liddell to resign his Art Professorship at Oxford on November 28:

The result of the Whistler trial (he says), leaves me no further option. I cannot hold a chair from which I have no power of expressing judgment without being taxed for it by British law.

Whistler, who already on the verge of insolvency was badly injured by the trial and its inconclusive result, solaced himself with pleasant epigrams at his opponent's expense, the best and worthiest of remembrance being perhaps the witty saying: 'A life passed among pictures makes not a painter else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself.'

To the outer world the trial was a storm in a teapot a trivial personal dispute between two great men, and

the smaller fry chuckled to find that these giants could lose their temper and fling language at each other like men of commoner clay.

But to each individual it was a serious quarrel on a serious subject, though the disputants could not get judge, jury, or populace to understand it. The dispute remains undetermined and the riddle remains unsolved. Whether the cave man and the child are really trying with soul and conscience to tell us the whole outward and inward truth of the subject etched on a bone or scrawled on a slate, or whether they are merely expressing decorative personal impressions of their own emotions about the subjects they deal with that was roughly the cause of action between Whistler and Ruskin.

The British jury assessed the commercial importance of the proposition at a farthing, but to lovers of art it remains one of the deep unanswered problems of the universe.

[The Manchester Guardian] THE DELIGHTS OF A READER

BY JOHN MASEFIELD

I HAVE been asked to write down the story of my first delight in books.

I cannot now remember what book first delighted me, nor the names of those half-dozen books, prose, and verse, which were pleasant to my early childhood; but I know that when I was about seven years old, I read, or partly read, two books, which made deep impressions on me. One of these books I read through many times and remember clearly. The other, which I never read through and the name of which I do not remember, stays in my mind as a picture. Perhaps the following account of a part of it may help some reader to name for me both story and writer.

As far as I can recollect, that part of the story which I read was printed in some periodical. I cannot remember the size of the periodical, but think that it was somewhere between the sizes of, say, Tit-Bits and the Field. I think that the periodical had no cover, but each number had a front page half filled with a title (now forgotten) and an illustration, engraved in some way. These decorations were crude, but sufficient to the mind of a child, which brings to all works of art more than enough to compensate for any lack in the artists.

In that part of the story which I remember, a man and a woman were alone together in a wild part of the United States. Whether they were married, in love with each other, fond of each other, indifferent to each other, or deadly enemies I cannot recollect, but hope for the best. Like Mr. Hardy's old corporal, I can say,

That's not my affair.

They were at Valenciennes.

see, except perhaps a ghost or so, is moving. Much more moving, and less uncanny, is the thought of a town deserted, then, by daylight. The castle of the Sleeping Beauty, peopled by sleepers, is a pleasant invention. Here in this story was a town peopled by nobody, yet with all the signs of life; the shops open perhaps, with their walls of biscuit tins and plate glass cylinders full of sugar plums; the doors swinging in the wind; the cats creeping about; the beds in the bedrooms just as they were left, with the dents of vanished heads still in the pillows.

In my mind, I entered into that still town, and lived there. For many days, in my spare time, I was a citizen in those streets, saying to myself, "The people have not gone. They will soon be coming back. They must be at a circus, or at some show, a menagerie, or waxworks; or perhaps it is a fair day.' Then I would listen to myself, but would hear no steam organ, no shouting, no noise of cattle, nor the faint roaring, mixed with music and with

In the story they came to a deserted town. It was a town which had sprung up and flourished about an oil-spring. Then the oil-spring had suddenly dried up, and the people had gone, leaving the town to decay. Somewhere above the town was the lake or reservoir which had once held the oil. Since the people had gone this lake had filled again. It was full when the man and woman arrived.

The idea of a deserted town thrills the mind of a child. Most children love the thought that at midnight their toys come to life and live a life of their own for some hours, and perhaps creep out like the cats, in the dark, to wander in the streets deserted by men. The thought of the still streets, with the blinds all drawn and nobody there to

than all, that is the breathing of a fair. All in those streets was silent, save for the wind, the creaking doors, the rattling windows, and the ticking of the clock. For in my mind in that town in some church or clock tower there was a clock that had been wound up before the people left. Perhaps the winder, before he left, had gone up into the clock-tower, among the jackdaws, with the thought, "This clock shall go long after we are all gone,' and had wound the clock to go for months. Then he had gone down the stairs in the dark, carrying his keys, and had locked up the tower and gone home to fetch his bundle before starting off with the rest. Now that all were gone this clock still told the hours with an awe, as though a heart should be in a dead

man.

I have forgotten what perplexities came to the couple while in the deserted town. Probably I never knew nor cared to what depths and heights they sank and soared. I remember only that when they had been there some little time the people of the town returned suddenly in their multitudes (some of them, I think, carried bags), having heard somehow that the oil had begun to flow again. In Lord Tennyson's 'Maud' the lady's brother suddenly returns as an interruption to the dreams of the lover. I think that the lovers in this old story probably paraphrased Lord Tennyson on this occasion:

The inhabitants have come back to-night,
Thus breaking up our dream of delight.

What moved in their minds I cannot now recollect, if I ever knew, but their minds moved. What he did is dark to me, but what she did is memorable. She went to the lake of oil armed with a spade and the means of making fire. Writers usually write of 'torches.' Let us suppose that she carried a 'torch' and a box of matches.

The lake or reservoir of oil was above the town. At the edge of the lake was a rim or dyke to keep the oil in its place. There may have been a sluice somewhere to let it out on occasion. The lady swiftly dug a gap in the dyke or rim, so that the black, sluggish stream might gush downward; then, lighting her torch, she flung it into the lake, so that the oil caught fire. It moved toward the town in a stream of flame. I think that the story must have ended here. Looking back upon the matter it seems an effective curtain. As Blake wisely says, 'Enough, or too much.' Anything more would have been anticlimax. She and the tale passed out thus against this background of moving fire that was to bring destruction, I presume, upon those who ran counter to the schemes of lovers.

Once I told the story to a man deeply read in Victorian romance, hoping that he could tell me what the story is and the name of its writer. He did not know, but he was shocked by the lady's action. 'What a wicked woman,' he said.

That had never occurred to me as a child. It seemed to me, then, that her act was an act of poetry, a beau geste, like Cleopatra's drinking of the pearls or Samson's pulling down of the temple. In any case I cannot condemn her, partly because the image of her was for long a pleasure to me, partly because I have no glimmering of a knowledge of what her motive may have been, nor of the fruit her action bore. 'It shall suffice that she was born and lived for my delight.'

My other memory of an early delight in reading dates from the same time in my life. Like the Eve of St. Mark, 'upon a Sabbath eve it fell'; some Sunday evening in May or June when I was about seven years old. I was alone in an old room. Everybody had gone to evening service, or had gone away from me to supper or to walk. I was routing through old bound volumes of All the Year Round and Chambers's Journal, in both of which a little boy could find enough ghost stories to make bedtime terrible. I had not long been free of those shelves of books. They were not yet explored; but first peepings opened doors into fairyland. There was a tale of a phantom coach (full of ghosts) which sometimes stopped to pick up living people; there was a tale in which the hero put a cross on a mountain top and then fell down a precipice (it was not the Master Builder, but 'fearfully thrilling' in something the same way); and there was a tale of a duel by moonlight, and another of a clanging bed, which clanged its top down on the sleeper so that he never woke.

On this Sunday evening while looking through Chambers's Journal I came upon chapters of a serial called "The War Trail,' by Captain Mayne Reid. Glimpses of it showed that it was no ordinary tale. The tales of the ghosts, the precipice, the duel, and the clanging bed were full of images of power and of terror, but in this tale, "The War Trail,' a man was writing of real life, out of a great experience, with what then seemed to me to be the intensest color. I turned to the beginning of the story and read the opening chapter, or rather the prelude to the symphony.

Land of the Nopal and Maguey - home of Montezuma and Malinché, I cannot wring thy memories from my heart. Years may roll on, hand wax weak. and so forth, but never can I forget thee.

The first paragraph vanquished me. I read on and on till bedtime, reading every word, whether I understood it or not, because of the color and strangeness which seemed to come with each word into the mind. I read as far as the twelfth chapter that night; the next day I read on in all spare moments till I had finished it. Then I began again upon it, and afterwards recommenced upon particular bits, the adventure with the prairie fire, the stalking of Moro by the grizzly bear, and the last adventure of the hero, the entering into the Indian camp in disguise.

Boys like books that open their horizons. Nowadays the books they love are about aeroplanes and airships, 'wind-shouldering airships,' from which the earth looks like a mouldy chess board. We had not that freedom in the past. Then the great plain of Texas was the horizon, the fenceless plain, over which Mangas Coloradas still rode with his troop to take the scalps of the paleface.

[The New Statesman] THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

WHERE the River Loire runs shallow over its broad bed, broken by willowed banks of sand that stand above the summer stream and are in winter spates drowned up to their topmost branches; where it goes between sharp, low, green hills, on either side full of caves that are a habitation for men all down its valley by Tours there was a murmuring and a noise. It was November, and there were storms in the valley. The suddenly-risen water drummed against the wooden piles of the long bridge and was swirling brown and thick up to the lower branches of the trees on the islands. Nor could a boat go easily against it, though towed by strong horses.

Men were passing backward and forward to the north and to the south over that long bridge of trestles from Tours the town - Tours with low roofs of spread red tiles to the caves upon the further shore where was a hive of monks, the monks all out of their cells to-day, eagerly catching the news in the market-place. The very old man, Martin, the Bishop of the city, was dying at Candes, miles away up river. He had not been able to come back to his own.

He was more than a king here, for he was also an ambassador of Heaven, and when he had gone along the streets muttering to himself and blessing rapidly those who knelt before him, the people felt that they had met something not only a man. The Emperor's Count who took the Pleas was small before him. The city held to him, and it was his own.

These walls of Tours were filled not only with his long presence, but with the stories, grown greater through days

of pilgrimage, of his strange missions into the Eastern Woods - into the Morvan and the dark Vosges; of dead men risen, and of lights seen in the sky. Also the army remembered him, because he had been a soldier. The quarters outside the walls told tales of him, the cantonments where the huts of the barbaric soldiers were, and whence passed into and out of the gates of the city the gentlemen, their officers, and the chieftains their rulers, marked upon their armor with silver and with gold. There were both songs and stories of how Martin fifty years before had ridden at the head of a column in his purple cloak, and those who had visited the German mountains and his father's valley by the Danube, could remember the portents of his birth.

Up there at Candes, Martin in his old age was dying, with some priests about him and the monks of a new house. He lay stretched upon a bed of reeds, still muttering to himself in a sort of sleep, the very old man; they watched for his passing as they stood around, and it seemed to them as though Heaven was leaning and touching earth to make a way for the ascent of his spirit. All the Church of Gaul was centred here in his starved and broken body and three full generations which had seen Gaul changed from the Pagan to the Christian thing. He still muttered faintly to himself upon his bed of reeds.

Within his closed mind, which no longer received the voices of this world, there passed great dreams or memories; his perpetual wandering over the earth in the pursuit of his Lord filled Martin now as he lay dying. He saw landscape after vivid landscape in which he stood outside himself, and perceived himself as a figure in the midst and remembered all his time.

He felt, as his mind so wandered, a

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strong horse beneath him, and he was upon that very straight western road which came up to the western gate of Amiens, striking from the Beauvaisis. He was a young soldier. He was not much more than a boy. Against the metal scales of his jerkin the sword hilt tinkled as he rode; the air was keen with winter; there were dark clouds over the east and a great menace of snow. The rolling upland was bare right up to the brick wall of the city. He saw the half-round bastions and a gate between. His mount moved impatiently through the biting wind. And as he went he saw crouching at the gate of the city that Beggar Man the memory of whose eyes had glorified his life thenceforward. He remembered the look, and how, with shame, but compelled by a fire within him, and looking up to watch whether the guard had noted an officer's folly, he had quickly cut his coat with his sword and thrown the fragment of warmth down to the half-naked man. He saw, he saw, the eyes still following him through the gate not only with gratitude, not only with benediction, but also with transfiguration. Now he was riding on into the town, ashamed in his mangled accoutrement, hiding the ludicrous short coat as best he could with his left bridle arm, but still thinking of those eyes. And Martin, lying there dying after nearly sixty years, murmured so that men around him could hear the words: 'It was the Lord! Martin, it was the Lord!'

Next, he was in the deep woods of the Aeduans, high up in the hills, three days and more from posting houses and from stone roads. The forest was damp all about him. He was in a clearing with two priests, his companions. And the wilder men of the hills were watching him sullenly while he broke their uncouth idol with an axe and preached to them the living God. But