I have a picture in my study, some

I have a picture in my study, some five feet long and eighteen inches from top to bottom. It is a landscape--in black and white, as our expression goes, but actually showing all shades of lovely grey. The foreground is in the right-hand corner, the background away to the left, a painting analysable into five sections, yet essentially a unity: mountains and their mists, pines, bamboos, a river promontory, flats of sand, all part of the one theme, a river winding its way out of the hill country to the plain. I have watched such scenes scores of time as my boat swung creaking down-stream with its cargo of bamboo paper or dried mushrooms, and maybe a huge coffin built of long-seasoned timber and destined for some rich merchant in a coast port. The artist gives it all back to me, in spring as he saw it, but also in summer and autumn and winter.