and a privilege to look over Mr. Thyng's collection of portfolios and sketches. They are full of suggestions dear to every lover of nature. There are pictures which call to memory rambles through the flowerdotted grass of June, the air full of fragrance, vibrant with the soft adagio of the winds among odorous pines, or the babbling lullaby of mountain brooks; pictures of shaded streams, dim with the green twilight of overhanging trees, where the speckled trout lurk beneath the cover of the rocks; pictures of ragged mountain sides, where not so long ago bears might have made their home; pictures of the lake at all times of the day, some with soft, blurred shadows made by the level light of dawn, some with the glare of noonday in them, and others. sweet with the illusory charm of twilight. There are pictures of farmhouses nestling among great ma ples, of country roadways, of woodland paths, dainty bits of mountain and lake scenery, drawn with a vital touch and extraordinary facility of expressing with a few touches the boundless variety and beauty of nature. "The Old Mill" is one of the most beautiful of Mr. Thyng's paintings; in subject and treatment it appeals to the highest sense of the beautiful, and challenges a most critical appreciation of the methods by which the effects are produced. Mosses cover the Old Mill, Days when all the world was young, Stream and Mill are dreaming o'er When, with many a creak and strain, To the worn-out, useless things. O sweet Lustre of Decay,- Besides admirable technical qualities, the painting of "The Old Mill" (its prototype in reality still standing at Gilford, N. H.) possesses in an extraordinary degree that pathetic charm and suggestive beauty which linger about all ruined and picturesque objects. To the impression which the fine coloring displayed in the painting of the natural environment of the old mill makes upon the beholder is added the entrancing sadness, the reminiscent feeling invoked by the mill itself. It requires no critical analysis of the artist's methods to understand and appreciate the effect and value of the picture, and herein lie its greatest claims to merit -a total absence of mannerism, and effects produced by the simplest and most natural methods. These characteristics are equally noticeable in other paintings by Mr. Thyng; in "Asquam Lake" they are apparent in a marked degree. The picture is a masterpiece in grays. The water is still, and suggests the near approach of twilight, harmonizing the amber-lighted sky with the rich grays and the stronger hues of the shore. The chief beauty and the triumph of art in the picture lie in the diffusion of the golden tone of declining day throughout the particulars of the plished more with his own brush. As it is, his sincerity, high aspiration, and delicate appreciation of the significance and beauty of nature, have made the brush in his hands a slender tongue of wonderful power for expressing the most poetic and subtler truths of form and color. By instinct, and in his love of beauty for its own sake, he is essentially an idealist; not the idealism represented by that class of pictorial madness put forth by Manet and his followers, but the beautiful faith that believes that from the loveliness of earth we derive our concepts of heaven, and, therefore, that any representation of spiritual beauty must be true in its essential details to the material facts before us. His own definition of the difference between idealistic and realistic art aptly illustrates the attitude of the two schools of painting towards the same pictorial material. "For instance," he says, "two artists are strolling down a country road on a summer day; one of them is a realist, the other an idealist. Presently, they come to a cottage nestling beneath the shadows of a majestic oak. About the door are clambering roses; morning - glories screen the sunlight from the little windows; on the roof lichens have softened with dull green the weatherbeaten gray of the shingles. From the road a grassy path leads to the door through a garden where quaint, old-fashioned flowers are growing in charming disorder and luxuriance, sunflowers and hollyhocks, poppies and marigolds, delicate sweet-peas, and over a half-decayed tree stump the running fire of the nasturtium vine-flowers such as our grandmothers loved long ago when they were young and could find beauty in the old blossoms that no one cares for nowadays. "In the grassy walk a little child is playing, and the clear sunshine and the blue heavens seem reflected in her golden curls and her wide eyes, and the joy of the carolling birds in the old oak sounds sweetly in her voice as she talks to herself and laughs out the untroubled blithesomeness of her childish heart. One of the artists pitches his easel before the scene, and with quick brush strives to place upon his canvas something of the beauty before him-the little cottage and the oak, and the spots of color in the oldfashioned garden, and the child with the sunlight in her hair, and bits of heaven in her eyes-the idealist paints on and on, and his picture embodies a perfectly beautiful memory of a summer day. By and by you wonder what has become of his companion, the realist; he is nowhere to be seen; you search for him, and then-By George! there he is at the back of the cottage, and has painted a faultlessly truthful picture of the ash barrel and the woodshed! In his black and white work Mr. Thyng possesses in a signal degree the quality of suggestiveness. True concentration in art is not meagreness in drawing; it means to so draw that every line will have a significance in l'ensemble, and in this respect Mr. Thyng's newspaper illustrations are equal to those of any artist in the country. To add or subtract a line, or a bit of black, in some of his drawings, would be to weaken them, so true is his sense of the amount of work necessary to convey the representation of his subject. His illustrated articles upon the picturesque in New Hampshire scenery, over the signature of "Stranger," have attracted much attention. All through these years, whose summer vacations have been filled with pen and ink and color work by the margins of New Hampshire's lakes, Mr. Thyng has had long and highly successful experience as instructor in drawing in public schools, where his skill as teacher has been strengthened by constant professional practice. His lectures upon art edu But, is this the end of the brightness, Is there nothing to hope or look for Yes! far up through that darkened chimney The firelight gleam is only a dream, And we awake in the realms of light. REPRESENTATIVE AGRICULTURISTS. By H. H. Metcalf. THOMAS O. TAYLOR, SANBORNTON. The old Taylor homestead in Sanbornton, whereon five generations of the name have dwelt,-descending from Jonathan, who came with his father, Nathan Taylor, from Stratham and settled on the place in 1773, to Thomas, the son of Jonathan, and to Andrew J., son of Thomas-is now owned and occupied by Thomas Osgood Taylor, son of Andrew J. and and Polly (Osgood) Taylor, born July 28, 1851, who was reared and has always had his home on the farm, receiving his education at the district schools and at the New Hampton Institution. Being the only son, he was associated with his father in the management of the farm, and thus continued after his marriage, January 25, 1876, with Miss Cinda W. Heath of Bristol, and upon his father's death, some six years later, the property passed into his hands. The farm, which is located one mile from Sanbornton Square and five miles from Tilton, on the stage road to New Hampton, contains about 300 acres of land, of which 50 acres are mowing Thomas O. Taylor. and tillage, the amount of hay crop being about 50 tons. Mr. Taylor has a silo, but in recent years has raised Hungarian instead of ensilage, as a supplementary feeding crop. For many years Mr. Taylor and his father made the raising of oxen and steers a specialty, producing many premium cattle of the Hereford strain. Of late, dairying has been the leading feature of his farm operations, the number of cows ranging |