IT has been rather amusing to sit to various artists; they have such different ways of working. When Herbert Schmalz did my portrait (1894) he was busy upon those enormous religious canvases of his which afterwards toured round England and Australia as a one-man show, and which are so well known in reproductions.

He was painting “John Oliver Hobbes” at the same time, and she and I went to the studio on alternate days. Although we were hardly alike, the names of Craigie and Tweedie had something of the same sound, and quite confused the little servant, who always announced me as Mrs. Craigie, and John Oliver Hobbes as Mrs. Tweedie. Those were pleasant sittings, and perhaps I went ten or twelve times for the picture. Herbert Schmalz is a careful, painstaking artist, who is prone to alter scheme or colour, and do the work all over again unless it pleases him. At that time Sir Frederick Leighton often came to the studio, which almost adjoined his own.

Leighton was one of the most courtly, charming men I ever knew. Short of stature, he still had a magnificent presence, and his grey head was grand. No President of the Royal Academy ever looked finer at the top of the stairs on soirée night than this splendid draughtsman. The Academy Soirée in his day was a grand function. His personality attracted all that was best. I never liked his painting, but always loved his drawing.

The portrait painted by Mr. Schmalz6 was one day standing in my hall a year or two later, when a new servant—new servants are luxuries I do not often indulge in—asked if the picture was going away.

“Yes,” I replied, “it is going to an exhibition.”

“I thought pictures only went to exhibitions when they were newly painted,” she remarked.

“So they do, as a rule,” I answered, “but this one is going to the Exhibition of ‘Eminent Women’ at Earl’s Court.”

“Lor’!” (in her surprise she nearly dropped what she was holding). “You don’t mean to say you are going there?”

Mohammed could not have been a prophet in his own household.

After all, plain truths and trifling jokes are often the most enjoyable, just as small ills are the least endurable.

When I sat to Blake Wirgman in 1902 for my portrait shortly after my visit to the West, he insisted on my being dressed in a dirty old divided skirt, huge Mexican sombrero, high boots, and shirt. The canvas is nearly life-size, and as I was foolish enough to submit to a standing position, with one foot up on a stone, I used to get awfully tired. Balancing on one leg in stiff riding-boots is apt to bring on cramp, so at odd intervals I danced round the studio to relieve my aching toes, and begged him to paint the boots without me. After dressing one day I returned to the studio, having put the boots on their trees, and placed them carefully beside the rocky stone where I stood. “There,” I exclaimed, “there are the boots, now can you paint them without torturing me.” Never shall I forget his peal of laughter at the idea of painting a pair of boots with wooden insides! However, he found a girl who took “threes” in boots, and she saved me a few hours of torture. Blake Wirgman is a delightful man, and I thoroughly enjoyed those sittings—all but the cramp.

“All but” reminds me of a dear old Scotch minister who used to read out the prayers for the Royal family, and to our amusement pronounced “Albert Edward Prince of Wales,” “All-but Edward Prince of Wiles.” This happened in a Highland kirk in Sutherlandshire, where the collie dogs used to come into the church and get up and shake themselves at the benediction, knowing that it was time to go home. A tuning-fork and a precentor added simplicity to the service, while the shepherds from the hills wore black coats and top-hats and pennies were collected on a tray at the door, just as represented in the play Bunty pulls the Strings.

The famous picture of “Scotch Elders” was painted by my husband’s cousin John Lorimer, A.R.A.; a very fine picture it is too. The appreciation of pawky Scottish humour runs in our blood, on both sides of the family, so my praise of a kinsman’s work will be readily understood as needing no apology.

Being with other workers amused and interested me, and made me forget the everlasting grind of my usual working-day. Mr. Cyril Davenport, of the British Museum, and author of many books on jewels, miniatures, and heraldry, made a vitreous enamel of my head. This is not paint, but powdered glass, shaken on the silver and then fired in a furnace. Some of the effects produced by this process are lovely. It is an old art revived, and a tricky one, as no workman knows the exact shade the furnace will turn out, any more than they did in the days of the manufacture of the famous rose du Barry.

It is quite a mistaken idea to suppose that sitting for a portrait necessitates sitting still. Far from it. Artists like one to talk and be amused, otherwise the sitter gets bored and the picture reflects the boredom. Few painters can work with a third person in the room, although Sir William Orchardson always preferred to have his wife reading aloud to him, or talking to his sitter while he was at the easel.

It may seem strange that so many people have painted my head, but please do not think it was the outcome of vanity on my part. I did not ask them; they asked me. Dozens have asked me to sit, and the baker’s dozen to whom I have sat have started off full of enthusiasm, found me difficult, and ended by thinking me horrid. Yes, horrid, I know. They have not said so in so many words, they have been too polite for that, but they have owned I was “very difficult, especially about the mouth.” That is why I have thirteen different mouths in thirteen different pictures. A mouth is the most expressive and the most characteristic feature of a face, and therefore the most elusive for the artist’s brush. When I am not talking, my face is as dull as London on a Bank Holiday.

Some painters make too much of a portrait and too little of a picture. Others, on the other hand, make too much of a picture and too little of a portrait. Really, the picture is of most consequence, because the good picture with its impression of the sitter remains, while the fleeting expression of the face and age of the sitter passes away.

Joy is only a flash, sorrow is an abiding pain. We women have lines of figure when young, but we must all expect lines of wrinkles when old.

Artists and writers are generally poor, but we are often happy. The greater the artist, the less he seems to be able to push his wares. It is the mediocre who ring the muffin-bell, or whose wives sell their cakes. A certain clever woman is said never to stop in a country house without returning home with an order for a new ship in her husband’s wallet. Well, why not? If a woman is smart enough to find purchasers for her husband’s pictures, his horses, or his ships, all honour to her. We all want agents, even literary agents—poor, dear, abused things—and if we can get our own flesh and blood to do the work without demanding a commission, so much the better, but we might give them a little acknowledgment sometimes.

The poor want to be rich, and the rich want seats in the House of Lords, while a Duchess wants to write books and be poor. The simple want to be great, while the great know the futility of fame. It is a world of struggle and discontent. The moment anybody can get seats for a first night, or tickets for a private view, nobody wants them.

That sounds rather Gilbertian.

The late Sir William S. Gilbert was a dear and valued friend of mine for many years. One of the most brilliant companions I ever knew when he chose, and one of the dullest when something had put him out. He talked as wittily as he wrote, and many of his letters are teeming with quaint idiosyncrasies. He was a perennial boy with delicious quirk.

So few people are as interesting as their work—they reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books. W. S. Gilbert was an exception—he was as amusing as his Bab Ballads, and as sarcastic as “H.M.S. Pinafore.” A sparkling librettist, he was likewise a brilliant talker.

How he loved a joke, even against himself! How well he told a story, even if he invented it on the spot as “perfectly true.” His mind was so quick he grasped the stage setting of a dinner-party at once, and forthwith adapted his drama of the moment to exactly suit his audience.

After a lapse of nearly twenty years “Iolanthe” was revived at the Savoy. Not one line or one word of the original text had been altered. “Pinafore,” when it was revived for the second time, just twenty-one years after its first performance, ran for months. How few authors’ work will stand such a test of excellence, yet Gilbert penned a dozen light operas.

The genesis of “Iolanthe” is referable, like many of Gilbert’s libretti, to one of the Bab Ballads. The “primordial atomic globule” from which it traces its descent is a ballad called “The Fairy Curate.”

It is a well-known fact that almost every comedian wishes to be a tragedian, and vice versa—look at Irving and Beerbohm Tree—and Gilbert had a great and mighty sorrow all his life. He wanted to write serious dramas, long five-act plays full of situations and thought; but no, fate ordained otherwise, when having for a change started his little bark as a librettist he had to persevere in penning what he called “nonsense.”

The public were right; they knew there was no other W. S. Gilbert, they wanted to be amused. Some say the art of comedy-writing is dying out, and certainly no second Gilbert seems to be rising among the younger men, no humorist who can call tears or laughter at will, and can send his audience away happy every night. The world owes a debt of gratitude to this gifted scribe, for he never put an unclean line upon the stage and yet provoked peals of laughter while slyly giving his little digs at existing evils. His style has created a name of its own; to be Gilbertian is all that is smart, brilliant, caustic, and clean.

Mr. Gilbert proudly remarked when he was just sixty-five, that he had cheated the doctors, and signed a new lease of life on the twenty-one-year principle. During those sixty-five years he had turned his hand to many trades. After a career at the London University, where he took his B.A. degree, he read for the Royal Artillery; but on the Crimean War coming to an end and no more officers being wanted, he became a clerk in the Privy Council Office, and was subsequently called to the Bar. He was also a Militiaman, and at one time an occasional contributor to Punch, becoming thus an artist as well as a writer. His pictures are well known, for all the two or three hundred illustrations in the Bab Ballads are from his clever pen. I saw him make an excellent sketch in a few minutes at his home on Harrow Weald; but photography cast its web about him and he disappeared into some dark chamber for hours at a time, alone with his thoughts and his photographic pigments. The results were charming.

What a lovely home that is, standing in a hundred and ten acres right at the top of Harrow Weald, with a glorious view over London, Middlesex, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire. He farmed the land himself, and talked of crops and stock with a glib tongue, although the real enthusiast was his delightful wife, who loves her chickens and her roses.

Sullivan always wrote the music after Gilbert had written the words. Gilbert’s ear for time and rhythm was impeccable, but he freely admitted that he had a very imperfect sense of tune.

The Gilberts were tremendous travellers; for many years they wintered in Egypt, India, the West Indies, Burma, or some other far-away land, and it was on these wanderings that he conceived ideas for the “Mikado.” When in Egypt for the third time, they nearly lost their lives in the railway accident between Cairo and Halouan. Fortunately they were only bruised from the concussion, but several of the passengers were killed and many wounded. The expert photographer was of course on the spot, and while waiting for a relief train W. S. Gilbert was busy with his camera. Being physically incapacitated by a long illness from being of any service to the sufferers, he contented himself with sitting on a rock in the desert and taking snapshots at the scene of the calamity.

Apropos of an interview I was writing on himself for one of a set that appeared in the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote the following amusing reply to my chaff suggesting all sorts of dreadful things that I would put in if he did not help me.

Amongst the many people who made a sketch of my head was the late Captain Robert Marshall, the author of “The Second in Command” and other delightful plays.

This came about a few days before the Coronation of Edward VII. We were having tea together, when he took out a pencil, and in a few minutes this soldier-playwright made a charming little sketch. What a strange thing it is that people who succeed in one particular thing are often so gifted in various other lines. And people who do not succeed at anything seem to have no versatility of any sort or kind, except to amplify the various forms of stupidity.

I first met Captain Marshall at Sir W. S. Gilbert’s. The younger man almost worshipped his host, and considered him a model playwright. On his side, Sir William had been very kind and encouraging. His manner was perfectly frank, and he never hesitated to say whether he thought a piece of work good or bad, as it struck him.

There are not many cases in which a man can earn an income in two different professions. Lord Roberts is a soldier and a writer; Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr. Weedon Grossmith, and Mr. Bernard Partridge are both actors and artists; Mr. Lumsden Propert, the author of a great book on miniatures, was a doctor by profession; Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. Edward Clodd have other occupations besides literature; Sir A. W. Pinero is no mean draughtsman; Miss Gertrude Kingston writes and illustrates as well as acts; and Mr. Harry Furniss is as clever with his pen as with his brush.

No one looking at Captain Marshall would have imagined that ill-health pursued him; such, however, was the case, and but for the fact that a delicate chest necessitated retiring from the army, he would probably never have become a dramatist by profession. “After one gets up in the service,” he amusingly said, “one receives a higher rate of pay, and has proportionately less to do. Thus it was I found time for scribbling, and it was actually while A.D.C. and living in a Government House, that I wrote ‘His Excellency the Governor.’ Three days after it came out I left the army.” Many men on being told to relinquish the profession they loved because of ill-health would have calmly sat down and courted death. Not so Robert Marshall. He at once turned his attention elsewhere; chose an occupation he could take about with him when each winter drove him to warmer climes to live in fresh air, doing as he was medically bidden, thus cheating the undertaker for ten years. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to spend an evening at the Opera. One night I happened to sit in a box between him and Mr. Cyril Maude, and probably there were no more appreciative listeners in the house than these two men, both intensely interested in the representation of “Tannhäuser.” Poor Mr. Maude was suffering from a sore throat, and had been forbidden to act that evening for fear of losing the little voice that remained to him. As music is his delight, and an evening at the Opera an almost unknown pleasure, he enjoyed himself with the enthusiasm of a boy, feeling he was having a “real holiday.” Since then he has appeared as a singer himself, in a Christmas frolic.

Herbert Bedford, the painter who married that delightful composer Liza Lehmann, was another once desirous to do a miniature of me. Accordingly, one terribly foggy morning in January, 1909, he arrived with his little box and ivory. He started; but of all things for a miniature a good light is the most necessary and fate was not kind. The fog deepened and blackened, till we were thoroughly enveloped in one of “London’s particulars.” I really think it was one of the worst fogs I remember; and that is saying a good deal, for I have not only had much experience in London, but have seen denser specimens in Chicago, and almost as bad in Paris and Christiania.

He waited an hour, but working was hopeless, so he departed. Next time he came, the morning was beautifully bright, but ill-fate pursued us, and we had no sooner settled down to work than Cimmerian darkness came on again. A week later a third attempt was made, and incredible as it may appear, the blackest of all smoky, yellow, carboniferous fogs arrived that day also. Verily, it was a black month. Though the morning was always fine when we started, the darkness arrived as soon as we were well settled down to work, as if from very “cussedness.”

November is named the month of fogs, but as a Londoner I should say they rarely come before Christmas, generally in January; and three or four during the entire winter is now our usual number. They seldom last more than a few hours; but they are so awful when they do come, that that is quite long enough, and the sooner science robs us of their presence the better. They certainly are less frequent and less severe than when I was a child. Poor old London climate! how we abuse it, and yet we have much to be thankful for. We do not get prickly heat or mosquitoes, sunstroke or ticks, neither do we have frost-bite or leprosy. The Marquis de San Giuliano, late Italian Ambassador in London and now Minister of Foreign Affairs in Rome, always maintained that London possesses the best climate in the world, and wondered why people ever left England with all its comforts in the winter, for the South with its cheerless houses and treacherous winds.

Madame Liza Lehmann has one of the most interesting faces I ever saw: fragile, delicate, refined. Once a well-known singer, but always shivering with nervousness, she left the public platform when she married, about 1894, and began composing. No woman has had more success.

“Liza doesn’t work, she conceives,” her husband once said as he stippled in my head. “For instance, sitting over the fire after dinner, I give her a poem that I think would make a song; she reads it through, drops it idly on the floor, and takes up the nearest book. I know the subject has not pleased. Another time she reads some verses, pauses, puts them on her lap, looks into the flames, waits and then reads them again. I say nothing; one word would spoil her thoughts. Again and again she reads them. She gazes into the flames or plays with her bracelet. Then, as in a dream, she gets up and fetches paper and pencil. In feverish haste she writes. I have known her write a song like that in ten minutes. I have known her go months and do nothing. Words speak to her, thoughts come, she seems at times inspired—but she can do nothing otherwise.

“One day she was at a publisher’s and was running through The Daisy Chain.

“‘Too serious,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it won’t sell.’ (He was wrong; it did.) She was angry.

“‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘the public can’t only want rubbish like this.’ And she rattled off something.

“‘Excellent, excellent,’ he cried; ‘just what they do want.’ That became a popular song, and fifty thousand copies were sold in no time.”

“I feel almost ashamed of that song,” she said to me one day. “It is not music at all, but I am punished for my sins; it haunts me on hurdy-gurdies and from boarding-houses, when the windows are open in the summer.”

Her husband is also an enthusiastic composer in a heavier line. His orchestral pieces have been played in Berlin, Russia, and other centres, but he cannot set a ballad to music, and has none of her pretty touch. He is a charming miniaturist, and once painted an interesting series of Meredith’s heroines.

Next in my gallery of artists comes Mr. Percy Anderson, who is almost better known by his designs for stage costumes than as a portrait-painter, although he has done some delightful sketches of women and children. His wonderful knowledge of human attire through the world’s history is well known. He has every period at his fingers’ ends, although sometimes, as in the case of “Ulysses” for His Majesty’s Theatre, he spends days and weeks in the British Museum, hunting about to find suggestions and designs for the required costumes; in fact, he even went to Crete on one occasion to copy the mural decorations, in order to be certain he was correct in his work.

Mr. Anderson is really an artist, not only in colour and form, but also in grouping and harmony. The greatest compliment he ever received was when he was invited to design the dresses for the famous “Ring” at Munich. That for an Englishman was indeed high praise from Germany. In working for the stage he often does six or seven hundred costumes for a single historical play. Each has to harmonise with its own tableaux groups, be right in detail and singly, yet form part of a scheme for the effect of the whole.

The water-colour drawing of me was done in a couple of hours. (See page 161.)

One summer day in 1903, I sat to John Lavery for a little sketch of my head, which that brilliantly clever artist painted in thirty minutes. I chanced to have sat next to him at dinner shortly before, and he had then exclaimed:

“I would like to paint your head!”

“You know how I hate sitting,” I replied.

“But could you not spare me half an hour one afternoon just for the gratification of making a sketch of you? Once I have gained that satisfaction I will give you the picture.”

This put a different complexion upon the matter, and accordingly one afternoon I went to his studio, near the South Kensington Museum, to be decapitated. That studio is probably the best proportioned in London. It was built by Sir Coutts Lindsay, and is almost square like a box. The high walls are covered with a sort of dull brown paper, and a few French chairs and bureaus are its only decoration. I sat down in one of these special chairs waiting for him to arrange his easel, when he exclaimed:

“That will do, just sit as you are, and if you don’t mind I should like to take off my coat, as when I paint at high pressure it is hot work.” To this I assented, and in a moment he was hard at it.

“Talk as much as you like,” he said. “Forget you are sitting; move your head or your arms as you wish, just simply think you are paying me a little call; never mind the rest.”

All this sounded delightful. Then in a few minutes the speaking-tube whistled, and a message was called up to know if Mr. Cunninghame Graham might come up.

“Do you object?” asked Mr. Lavery, “Because he knows you are sitting to me, and said he would like to come if he might.”

“Not in the least,” I replied; “I should like it.”

Cunninghame Graham in the capacity of chaperon was a novel experience.

So up he came, and took a seat immediately behind the artist so that my eyes should not wander from the right direction for the picture. Was there ever a greater contrast than those two men? Lavery, short and broad, with ruddy cheeks, dark hair, and little, round, twinkling black eyes full of life and verve, and the calm aristocratic, artistic Cunninghame Graham, who always looks exactly like a Velasquez picture, so perfect is he in drawing and colouring.

Mr. Lavery has a curious arrangement for his palette. There is a table at his right hand, upon which a palette slants as on a desk. It is about three feet by two in size, and can hold a large number of colours.

“I require lots of paint and lots of room to splash about, and I like the table arrangement; it is, in fact, the only way I can work,” he remarked.

We chatted on about many subjects, and when the conversation turned on Velasquez, whose wonderful pictures I had visited in Madrid only a few months before, Cunninghame Graham waxed warm. Although descended from a stock old as any in Scotland, his mother (or his grandmother) was a Spaniard, and there is clearly some of the warm Southern blood in his veins. He speaks Spanish with a charming accent, and has the true Castilian lisp and pretty intonation.

In the ’nineties I was riding along the shore in Tangier with W. B. Harris, The Times correspondent, Sir Rubert Boyce, of the Liverpool University, and the late Mr. Russell Roberts, a well-known barrister, when we saw two men riding towards us. One of them was performing all sorts of wild antics upon his steed, standing on the saddle and waving his whip in the air. As he galloped towards us I thought he must be a cowboy let loose, but as he came nearer he looked like a picture of Charles V painted by Velasquez which had stepped out of its frame. The tawny hue of his clothes, the brown leather of his boots, the loose shirt, the large brown felt sombrero, and the pointed brown-grey beard seemed familiar, and as the man drew nearer I discovered it was Mr. Cunninghame Graham, with whom was Will Rothenstein.

The next night I heard this descendant of old Scotland’s shores expounding Socialism to a handful of Arabs in Spanish. Well, well, Mr. Graham has his foibles; but he is doubtless the most brilliant short story writer in our language; and as fine a rider as any I ever saw on the open prairie catching wild bulls for the ring.

Cunninghame Graham is a strange personality; he is an artistic being, and Mr. Lavery’s portrait of him is inimitable. It has been exhibited all over the world and is well known.

Suddenly Cunninghame Graham exclaimed, “Twenty-seven minutes are up.”

“All right!” replied the painter. “Let me know when the next three have gone.”

“Thirty minutes, my friend. Time is up.”

Lavery looked round at me, smiling.

“Done. I shan’t touch it any more. You allowed me thirty minutes, but you must let me have a moment over-time to add your name to the canvas, and then you may take it home with you.”

And I did so.

In 1910, that canvas appeared at the Exhibition of Fair Women at the Grafton Gallery, and a month or two later to my surprise I found it reproduced in a large volume of works by Scottish artists published in Edinburgh, under the title, Modern Scottish Portrait Painters, by Percy Bate.

So much is John Lavery appreciated abroad that his most famous pictures hang in Pittsburg and Philadelphia in the United States; in the Pinakothek, Munich; the National Gallery of Brussels, the Luxembourg in Paris, the Modern Gallery of Venice, the National Gallery of Berlin, although a few have luckily been gleaned by the public galleries of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

It is a curious fact that Mr. Lavery sent six or seven years continuously to the Academy, and six or seven times his pictures were refused. In 1888 the Committee accepted his “Tennis Party”—to his amazement—and actually hung it on the line. It went to Paris, where it gained a gold medal, was then “invited” to Munich, where it was finally bought for the National Gallery. He continued to send to the Academy for a few years, generally without success, but those rejected pictures are now hanging in various National Galleries. Suddenly in 1910 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

Concerning John Lavery, he told two funny little stories about himself one night when he was dining with me. The Exhibition of Fair Women, in 1908, had been attracting all London.

“A picture of mine was lost there,” he remarked.

“Lost? How?”

“Well, I painted the portrait of a lady, and this picture went to the New Gallery. It was three-quarter length. When its space was allotted it was stood on the floor under the place where it was to hang, but when the moment of hanging came the picture was gone, and what is more, has never been heard of since.”

“Who would take it?”

“That is more than I can say.”

“Why would they take it?”

“For the sake of the frame.”

“But was the frame anything very remarkable?”

“Oh, it was worth about ten pounds.”

I laughed: “So they stole your valuable painting worth some hundreds of pounds for the sake of a ten-pound frame. What have you done to get it back?”

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Nothing,” I repeated, amazed.

“No, my only chance of ever seeing that picture again is to do nothing. You see, it is this way. If a thief realised it was a valuable painting which had attracted attention and was being searched for, he would destroy it. Whereas, if he thinks it is of no value, he will sell it in some back slum, and in course of time the picture will turn up again. At least that is what we artists think. I have no replica, not even a photograph, but the lady has kindly promised to sit again. Mercifully, it was not an order, but my own picture; and in a year or two I shall exhibit the second portrait and let it be photographed for different papers, when, in all probability, someone will discover they have one just like it, and we may be able to trace the picture back to the original thief. The frame must have attracted his attention, for it was not quite ordinary. I had it made in Morocco.”

“Have you ever had any other queer episode with a picture?”

“Yes,” he replied. “There is a certain well-known lady whose husband has her painted every year by some artist. She is good-looking and this is his hobby. My turn came. I painted the picture. It was barely finished, and had to go to an exhibition while the paint was still wet. When I went on varnishing day I was surprised to see a curious green haze over the face just as when you stick your nose against a window-pane, and the skin appears green in hue. I did nothing at the time, but determined to make some little alteration when the exhibition closed. The portrait came home. I looked at it. Yes, there was still that strange green hue over it, so I began to take it out of the frame in order to touch it up.

“Imagine my horror when I found that the canvas had stuck to the glass! and the more I lifted it, lumps of paint from the lady’s cheeks stuck to it. I did everything I could think of to get the two apart, ending by leaving the glass and losing my temper.

“‘Oh,’ said an artist friend, ‘just break the glass, and you will find it will be easier to get the portrait away.’

“Accordingly, I broke the glass. Worse and worse! bits of the canvas broke too, and anything more deplorable than my poor lady with her torn canvas and bits of glass hanging to her nose cannot be imagined. The issue was critical.

“I dared not tell her, for her husband had liked the picture, so I determined to copy it. For three solid months I painted every day at that copy. I never can copy anything, and that was my last attempt. The more I worked the worse it grew. I really was in despair. They kept bothering me for the return of the picture. The lady was abroad and could not sit again. They had paid me for a thing that was destroyed, and I was at my wits’ end.

“One day the lady was announced. I felt in an agony. Then I thought, before confessing, I would have one desperate and final shot. I told her I wanted to make a slight alteration—would she sit? She amiably complied. I seized the copy; feverishly for a couple of hours I worked upon it, and then—all at once the long-lost likeness returned. I had got it.

“The picture was sent home; her people were delighted with it, and it was not till long afterwards that I told them the awful episode, by which I had at least painted half a dozen portraits of that lady.”

Live and learn. Education is one constant enquiry, and knowledge is but an assimilation of replies.