I found the hotel full of
English painters, whom the fine summer had attracted thither as
usual. The landlord got me a bed in the village. A six-o'clock _table
d'hote_ was going on when I arrived, and I joined it. Save myself,
the guests were, I think, landscape painters to a man. They had been
sketching in the neighbourhood. I thought I had never met so genial
and good-natured a set of men, and I have since often wondered what
they thought of me, who met such courteous and friendly advances as
they made towards me in a temper that must have seemed to them morose
or churlish and stupid. Before the dinner was over another tourist
entered--a fresh-complexioned young Englishman in spectacles, who,
sitting next to me, did at length, by force of sheer good-humour,
contrive to get into a desultory kind of conversation with me, and,
as far as I remember, he talked well. He was not an artist, I found,
but an amateur geologist and antiquary. His hobby was not like that
fatal antiquarianism of my father's, which had worked so much
mischief, but the harmless quest of flint implements.
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