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and of the jagged, wildly beautiful limestone and marble mountains near Ipoh, and when Veraguth asked if there were no pictures of natives, he dug out photographs of Malays, Chinese, Tamils, Arabs, and Javanese, naked athletic harbor coolies, wizened old fishermen, hunters, peasants, weavers, merchants, beautiful women with gold ornaments, dark naked groups of children, fishermen with nets, earringed Sakai playing the nose flute, and Javanese dancing girls bristling with silver baubles. He had photographs showing palms of every kind, lush broad-leafed pisang trees, patches of rain forest traversed by thousandfold creepers, sacred temple groves and turtle ponds, water buffalo in rice paddies, tame elephants at work and wild elephants playing in the water and stretching their trumpeting trunks heavenward.
    The painter picked up photograph after photograph. Some he thrust aside after a brief glance, some he placed side by side for comparison, some figures and heads he examined carefully through the cup of his hand. Several times he asked at what time of day the picture had been taken, measured shadows, and became more and more deeply immersed.
    Once he muttered absently. “One might paint all that.”
    â€œEnough!” he finally cried out, and heaved a sigh. “You must tell me much more. It’s wonderful having you here! Everything looks different to me now. Come, we’ll walk for an hour. I want to show you something.”
    Aroused, his tiredness gone, he went out, followed by Burkhardt. First they took the road. Homeward-bound hay wagons passed in the opposite direction. He breathed in the warm rich smell of the hay, and a memory came to him.
    â€œDo you remember,” he asked, laughing, “the summer after my first semester at the Academy, when we were in the country together? I painted hay, nothing but hay, do you remember? For two weeks I wore myself out trying to paint some haystacks on a mountain meadow, they just wouldn’t come out right, I couldn’t get the color, that dull hay gray! And then when I finally had it—it still wasn’t exactly delicate, but at least I knew I had to mix red and green—I was so happy that I couldn’t see anything but hay. Oh, what a wonderful thing it is, that first trying and searching and finding!”
    â€œIt seems to me,” said Otto, “that there’s always more to learn.”
    â€œOf course. But the things that torment me now have nothing to do with technique. Do you know, more and more often in the last few years something I see brings back my childhood. In those days everything looked different; one day I hope to put something of that in my painting. Once in a while I recapture the feeling for a moment or two, suddenly everything has that special glow again—but that’s not enough. We have so many good painters, sensitive, discriminating men who paint the world as an intelligent, discriminating, unassuming old gentleman sees it. But we have none who paints it as a fresh, high-spirited, imperious boy sees it, and most of those who try to are poor craftsmen.”
    Lost in thought, he plucked a reddish-blue gypsy rose at the edge of the field and stared at it.
    â€œAm I boring you?” he asked as though suddenly waking, with a diffident look at his friend.
    Otto said nothing but smiled.
    â€œYou see,” the painter went on, “one of the pictures I should still like to paint is a bouquet of wildflowers. My mother, you must know, could make bouquets such as I’ve never seen since, she was a genius at it. She was like a child, almost always singing, her step was very light and she wore a big brownish straw hat, that’s how I always see her in my dreams. Some day I should like to paint a bouquet of wildflowers, the kind she liked: gypsy rose and yarrow, and little pink bindweed, with a few blades of fine grass and a green oat stalk. I’ve brought home a hundred such bouquets, but