question of the subject-matter of the pictures, as though it had
troubled her.

She looked up at them, and said: "How is it that though we are so
interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to
writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern
life, or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures
unlike that life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves? How is
it that we find the dreadful times of the past so interesting to us--
in pictures and poetry?"

Old Hammond smiled. "It always was so, and I suppose always will
be," said he, "however it may be explained. It is true that in the
nineteenth century, when there was so little art and so much talk
about it, there was a theory that art and imaginative literature
ought to deal with contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if
there was any pretence of it, the author always took care (as Clara
hinted just now) to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some
way or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude
there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the
Pharaohs."

"Well," said Dick, "surely it is but natural to like these things
strange; just as when we were children, as I said just now, we used
to pretend to be so-and-so in such-and-such a place. That's what
these pictures and poems do; and why shouldn't they?"

"Thou hast hit it, Dick," quoth old Hammond; "it is the child-like
part of us that produces works of imagination. When we are children
time passes so slow with us that we seem to have time for