I came home from the races quite mad, and so keen to get to work!” After which he became more enthusiastic still over the yacht-races, and I realised that regattas, social fixtures where well dressed women might be seen bathed in the greenish light of a marine racecourse, might be for a modern artist as interesting a subject as were the revels which they so loved to depict for a Veronese or Carpaccio. When I suggested this to Elstir, “Your comparison is all the more true,” he replied, “since, from the position of the city in which they painted, those revels were to a great extent aquatic. Except that the beauty of the shipping in those days lay as a rule in its solidity, in the complication of its structure. They had water-tournaments, as we have here, held generally in honour of some Embassy, such as Carpaccio shows us in his

Legend of Saint Ursula