numerous family live upstairs.

The Reverend Samuel Reynolds also had a numerous family--there being
eleven children--so the present occupation is a realistic restoration of
a previous condition.

The grocer has a leaning toward art, for his walls are well papered with
chromos and posters; and as he sold a cabbage to a good housewife he
nipped off a leaf for a pen of rabbits that stood in the doorway, and
talked to me glibly of Reynolds and Gainsborough. The grocer considers
Gainsborough the greater artist, and surely his fame is wide, like unto
the hat--hated by theater-goers--that his name has rendered deathless,
and which certain unkind ones declare has given him immortality. Joshua
was the seventh child in the brood of five boys and six girls. The fond
parents set him apart for the Church, and to that end he was placed in
the Plympton Grammar-School, and made to "do" fifty lines of Ovid a day.

The old belief that to translate Latin with facility was the true test of
genius has fallen somewhat into desuetude, yet there are a few who still
hold to the idea that to reason, imagine and invent are not the tests of
a man's powers; he must conjugate, decline and derive. But Grant Allen,
possessor of three college degrees, avers that a man may not even be able
to read and write, and yet have a very firm mental grasp on the eternal
verities.

Anyway, Joshua Reynolds did not like Latin. He hated the set task of
fifty lines, and hated the system that imposed a fine of twenty lines for
a failure to fulfil the first.

The fines piled up until young Joshua, aged twelve, goin' on thirteen,