each stem, seemed to stand out in the boldest relief, and the feathers of the birds had that soft separate distinctness which is necessary to form a true representation of the living whole: yout could almost imagine that they were about to spring from the tiny stem on which they perched; the eyes appeared to twinkle, and the throat to warble. Truly, these were studies true to life, both in form and colour.
We passed on from one group of students to another, and I examined their work with the interest that only an artist can take in art. One girl was at work on a colossal painting of a man of her period. Here, the drawing and colouring was all that could be desired; but the subject! No doubt it pleased her; yet the so-called beauty and proportion of this extraordinary race was in discord with all my pre-conceived notions of what is symmetrical in the human form. Still I afterward discovered that it was possible to have one's ideas altered.
Coming to a group of landscape painters I
