Climbing the stairs to the flat, I passed a girl who was toiling upwards.

Pressing the button of the electric bell I watched her ascend the last flight. She paused. I inferred that our destination was the same, noted that she carried a satchel, a thick notebook, and a paper-covered sixpenny reprint. Mildly curious as to the title of the novel, I dissembled, and read "Endeavours after the Christian Life," by James Martineau. Therewith the stone staircase faded away, the stone walls opened to the past, and I saw my youth, and the figure of my father returning one night to the old home, his face illumined, his eyes shining; heard again the earnest words between him and my mother; how he had been at Martineau's valedictory address, how with the teacher's communication telling of deep things of the spirit moving within him he had avoided friends, unable to return suddenly to earth, and how he had walked home as if with wings. Those were the days when the "Endeavours" was a costly, exclusive, and somewhat revolutionary book. A few quick years, and lo! it becomes one of Allenson's sixpenny series, bought by the hundred thousand.

The door of the flat opened, Martineau slept again with his forefathers, the saints of all time, and the girl and I passed into the modest room dedicated to one who was no saint. Yet I do not know. If a saint be he who by his life makes this world for others more wonderful, more beautiful and better worth living in, then Joseph Mallord William Turner was a saint. Which is strange.

I did not speak of saints to our hostess, for Turner is her god, and a god is greater than a half-god. There is one severe note in her room—the bust of CÆsar on a pedestal; all the rest is beauty—sheer beauty. I wonder what a far-horizon Colonial, who had never seen Turner's later water-colours, would feel in this room; walls covered with sensitive copies of those flushes of radiant colour, waning blue dawns, purple mysteries of eve, sunlighted Swiss lakes, dream buildings, rainbow reaches of the Rhine, opalescent distances stretching past headlands into infinity.

The head of CÆsar, from his tall pedestal, surveyed these lyrics in colour, as strange to him as would have been the "Endeavours after the Christian Life," that paper book, tightly clutched, hidden from view, in a girl's hand. Then twilight came, the lamp was lighted, and I went away to carry out an idea that had just shaped itself.

I had never seen the house in Queen Anne Street where Turner lived with Mrs. Danby and the cats. Should I find the house changed—houses rather, for he owned three, two in Harley Street, and one in Queen Anne Street, communicating mysteriously at the back, and leaving the corner building in other hands.

As I walked through the Bloomsbury Squares I thought not of Turner, but of another, a man, very old, very frail, bent almost double, with the face of a spirit and the eye of a seer, whom years ago I had met on this very spot, creeping round the railings which encircle the grass and trees—James Martineau, still lingering in the world which his spirit had long outsoared. I saw, in the mind's eye, that shrivelled octogenarian figure, and I asked at three shops for the "Endeavours after the Christian Life," found it in the fourth, and under lamp-post and by lighted windows, turned the familiar pages and read fragments.

The chapter headings stirred old thoughts, and there was one passage in the discourse on "Immortality" that seemed the voice of the dead murmuring as I went westward through the dark squares, saying that we see here only the partial operation of a higher law, that we witness no extinction, but simply migrations of the mind, which survives to fulfil its high offices elsewhere, and find perhaps in seeming death its true nativity.

As I walked that voice stilled the tumult of the traffic, companioned me through unfamiliar streets, until I knew by the brass plates on the doors, and the lighted rooms shining through holland blinds in upper stories, that I was in Harley Street, and near to Turner's house. Which was it?

A frock-coated, shining-hatted, prosperous personage, carrying a small black bag, was inserting a latch-key in one of the brass plate doors. As I advanced, his black bag swung up to cover his watch-chain.

"Which was Turner's house?" said I.

"Turner! What Turner? Was he a medical man?"

"No! the great Turner, I mean the Painter."

He collected himself, reflected, and said: "Ah! I do remember something! Yes, there is a tablet on the house yonder."

I peered up at the dwelling and saw, half way to the roof, a medallion, and the lamplight shining upon the first letters of the name Turner. This was the house of him who interpreted the feel of Nature, the movement of sea and wind, the glory of the sun, the mystery of its veiled face, the pomp of the world, the magic influence of light so transcendently that we say: "Yes! this magician was initiate! This queer Englishman was near to the eternal dream of his Maker."

As I stood in the dark street and looked up at Turner's house, the Shades gathered about me. A wizard in words joined this son of a London barber, and that saint whose works have gone into a sixpenny edition.

This was the house that Ruskin knew. Behind these walls, were stored the pictures and water-colours in praise of which the most eloquent, the most inspiring, the most wilful and bewildering book that has ever been written upon art, was composed. Book? A library! The index alone of "Modern Painters" fills one volume. On the doorstep of this house Turner once stood and said to his disciple, who was about to start forth on a foreign tour—"Don't make your parents anxious. They'll be in such a fidge about you." He did not understand literary enthusiasm, and I doubt if he ever read a page of the copy of "The Stones of Venice" that Ruskin presented to him.

Three ghosts in a walk through London! Three great figures that trailed through the nineteenth century—a wizard in paint, a wizard in words, a wizard in holiness. Which is the greatest? Ruskin and Martineau explained, taught, chided, interpreted, and uplifted. Turner just acted, was content merely to express himself, to state his wonder at the wonder of the world. Is not his influence the most enduring? A man of few words and those mostly incoherent, who taught nothing, believed nothing, gazed on the sun with hope, and did superhuman things. His prayers were his pictures.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh