I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep
on evergreen-strewings.
During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to
rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold
Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the
game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks
and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the
testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from
picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the
sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the
gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a
gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of
injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.
Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists
began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a
living landscape, _color_-studies on the spot; and though I am not here
to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks'
camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for
future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the
feet of the greatest masters.
Pages:
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283