After our first meeting, Colin had dropped in to see me again from time
to time, and when his work at the great house was finished, I had asked
him to come and share my solitude. A veritable child of Nature himself,
he fitted into my quiet days as silently as a squirrel. So much of his
life had been passed out-of-doors with trees and skies, long dream-like
days all alone sketching in solitary places, that he seemed as much a
part of the woods as though he were a faun, and the lore of the elements,
and all natural things--bugs and birds, all wildwood creatures--had
passed into him with unconscious absorption. A sort of boyish
unconsciousness, indeed, was the keynote and charm of his nature. A less
sophisticated creature never followed the mystic calling of art.
Fortunately for me, he was not one of those painters who understand and
expound their own work. On the contrary, he was a perfect child about it,
and painted for no more mysterious reason than that his eye delighted in
beautiful natural effects, and that he loved to play with paint and
brushes. Though he was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side
of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed
it from his talk. "A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way
of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary
mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your
"sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all,
that painting was his way of seeing and saying it.

The moon rose as we smoked on, and began to lattice with silver the
darkness of the glen, and flood the hillside with misty radiance. Colin
made for his sketch-box.

"I must make good use of this moon," he said, "before we go."

"And so must I," said I, laughing as we both went out into the night, he