The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (9.1896)

Four Prose Fancies

246

domes and bright-faced windows—and ever are the voices at the
corners and the crossings calling out the sweet flower-names of
the spring !

But here in the country it is still all rain and iron. I am tired
of waiting for this slow-moving provincial spring. Let us to the
town to meet the spring—for :

“ They’ve taken all the spring from the country to the town—

Like the butter and the eggs and the milk from the cow ;

And if you want a primrose, you write to London now,

And if you need a nightingale, well—Whiteley sends it down.”

Ill—About the Securities

hen I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so

far as possible to dissociate the statement from any conven-
tional, and certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which
you may have acquired. Death sometimes shows himself one of
those impersonal artists who conceal their art, and, unless you had
been told, you could hardly have guessed that Matthew was dying,
dying^indeed sixty miles an hour, dying of consumption, dying
because some one else had died four years before, dying too of

Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood ; at a glance,
would have named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those
noble hollows in the finely modelled face,—that Pygmalion who
turns all flesh to stone,—at a glance would have named the painter
who was cunningly weighting the brows with darkness that the
eyes might’shine the more with an unaccustomed light. Matthew
and I had long been students of the strange wandering artist, had

debt.

begun