CHAPTER II.
THE APPEAL OF THE PAINTINGS Suppose our citizen and golfer, deliberately dropped in the preceding chapter, had a child, a son, who by a freak of heredity was brooding and imaginative, fond, in a childish way, of pictures and books, but quite indifferent to scientific criticism and the methods of the analytic men.
During his school holidays his mother would take him to the pantomime, and to the National Gallery.

Dazed, he would scan the walls of pictures, wondering why so many of them dealt with Scriptural subjects, and why some were so coloured, and others so dim.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A SAVANT 1631.

The Hermitage, St.Petersburg.] But after the third or fourth visit this child began to recognise favourites among the pictures, and being somewhat melancholy and mystical by nature, liking trees, beechwood glades, cathedral aisles, and the end of day, he would drag upon his mother's arm when they passed two pictures hanging together in the Dutch room.

One was called _The Woman taken in Adultery_, the other, _The Adoration of the Shepherds_.

These pictures by Rembrandt attracted him: they were so different from anything else in the gallery.