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As we receded from the fair, the bright illumination in the distance, the twinkling lights in the fore-ground, dimly revealing dusky figures cowering round their fires, and the dark depths of the wood beyond, with now and then a gleam of moonshine streaming on its tangled paths, made up a landscape roll of scenic effects.
The woman under the white light of the electrolier drew back from Keenan, with her eyes still on his face, so that her head and shoulders stood out, a target of black against the white fore-ground. Then she drew one hand quickly across her forehead, and, wheeling slowly, let her puzzled glance sweep the entire circle of the room, until once more her eyes rested upon the expectant eyes of Keenan.
The pictures in the Doge's house are a magnificent collection; and the Noah's Ark by Bassano would doubtless afford an actual study for natural historians as well as painters, and is considered as a model of perfection from which succeeding artists may learn to draw animal life: scarcely a creature can be recollected which has not its proper place in the picture; but the pensive cat upon the fore-ground took most of my attention, and held it away from the meeting of the Pope and Doge by the other brother Bassano, who here proves that his pencil is not divested of dignity, as the connoisseurs sometimes tell us that he is.
A rustic bridge connected the two buildings, and just above it was the bath room, into which a portion of the stream had been diverted, so as to form a natural shower bath. The stream and bridge and cottage, with their back-ground of hills and fore-ground of roses, combined to make such a picture that X. longed to be able to sketch it and take it away and keep it.
Next behind, on the right, was a long-nosed gar-fish singing alto, and proud of her slender form, with the last new thing in folding fans held in her fin. In the fore-ground squatted a great fat frog with big bulging eyes, singing base, and leading the choir by flapping his webbed fingers up and down with his frightful cavern of a mouth wide open.
The rich world through which he moves lies in the fore-ground of his consciousness; and it gives up new secrets to him at every step. "No-Eyes," when told of his adventures, usually refuses to believe that both have gone by the same road. He fancies that his companion has been floating about in the air, or beset by agreeable hallucinations.
It represents, or seems to represent, a piece of high open ground, down-land or heath, with a few low bushes growing there, sprawling and wind-brushed; a road crosses the fore-ground, and dips over to the plain beyond, a forest tract full of dark woodland, dappled by open spaces. There is a long faint distant line of hills on the horizon.
Then leaning over the hatch-door, her rosy cheek half-resting on the rough shoulder of her rough husband, was the pretty Mistress Maud, the personification of rustic English beauty; then the picturesque grouping of the old and worn, but still gallant and manly sailors our friend of the wooden legs a little in the fore-ground, supported by the quizzical seaman, and a tall stiff bony-looking "Black Sal" of a woman on the other, whose complexion was contrasted by a snow-white cap, somewhat pointed at the top, which hardly concealed her grizzled hair.
What confusion! what mistakes! fiddlers and painters judging by their eyes and ears admirable! trusting to the passions excited in an air sung, or a story painted to the heart instead of measuring them by a quadrant. In the fore-ground of this picture, a statesman turning the political wheel, like a brute, the wrong way round against the stream of corruption by Heaven! instead of with it.
In the fore-ground was an open lawn, on which scores of fine-plumaged pheasants strutted briskly, and myriads of rabbits came forth at eve to play and nibble bordered by crops of fern, above which moved statelily the antlered deer.
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