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A GALLEBY OF LIVING PICTURES 109 chibouk and stretching a hand with a huge turquoise ring on it over a chafing-dish of live charcoal, looking as if, for him, customers had no existence. One mentions all this quickly, and then one passes on. But the eye lingered as words cannot linger, as if it would feed on everything and never could have enough—on the masses of quaint detail shining and glimmering in the foreground, on the dimmer objects swimming slowly into sight out of the shadow, on the clear shadows melting into im-penetrable darkness, and on all the luminous colours in movement or hanging stationary. Had I only been an artist, I should have longed to be painting everything, and thus to seize it and make its beauty my own. Passing from this street into another, the longing grew even keener. I felt as if I were in a gallery of living Eembrandts or Van Ostades. What we had entered was the street of the grocers. Here the subdued light flickered on bunches of yellow candles, destined for burning at Christian or Moslem shrines, on huge oil-jars in which the Forty Thieves might have hidden, and on piles of globular cheeses with madder-coloured rinds. They all caught the eye, painted on deep shadow. Then from this street we passed into that of the fruiterers and the sweetmeat-sellers. The change was like that of passing to the works of some other Dutchman. Here in shadow that was browner and more translucent was the fresh greenness of vegetables. There were

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