PASSING, on a summer day, along a thoroughfare which forms one side of a widespread area, once a fashionable old-town suburb with many substantial dwellings, mansions, and houses, detached or in rows, gathered about an open space, now enclosed and still retained for garden and recreative purposes, with pools and fountains in it replacing an ancient fish-pond, my eye lighted upon a weather-worn, brick-built house of an old-time gentility, standing there with unchanged front amid many changes of a modernising kind, and reminiscent, in certain quaint features, of the early days in which its foundations were laid. Its windows, with their old-fashioned framework, were bowed or bayed continuously through two stories, and in the gray-slated roof there was a diminutive dormer. Within the little garden space in front were some evergreen shrubs of privet, and from among them rose a tall ash tree, whose leafy branches in part cast dark shadows through the window places and, higher up, were lifted above the roof. The house for the time was untenanted, and wore that appearance, suggestive of conscious desertion, which one sometimes recognises in unoccupied tenements. In the present case this touch of melancholy was appropriate, inasmuch as it was associated with the recollection that this was the last dwelling-place of my friend the artist, and also of certain pathetic circumstances connected with his departure therefrom. |