MR. GLADSTONE
me to sell the picture to the State! No wonder the little emissary of good fortune had lingered so long with us!
"Sell it by all means," Ford called out after I had read the letter; "never mind the price. I would give almost anything for this honour."
In those days it was a much-coveted distinction among English and American artists to be represented in the collection of Modern Art which the French Government was bringing together in the Luxembourg Museum. Before that year, if I am not mistaken, only one foreign picture hung in the gallery. That year Sargent's Carmencita, Whistler's Mother, and the little Gladstone were added. Whistler, so I am told, resented the inclusion of the small portrait in the same class as that of the Mother and, if the story is not exaggerated, exclaimed, "Why drag in Hamilton! Who is he, anyhow? "Alas for human foresight! He lived long enough to discover me as an "enemy."
There was great rejoicing in the cabarets that night, as, arm-in-arm, we wandered through the mazes of the Latin Quarter, seeking out the old haunts of my student days and ending again in the allées of the Champs Élysées scintillating with lamps of all shades of colour, where we listened to Aristide Bruant dans son café.
The episode was ended. A silver chain had been forged in Paris many years before by Svengali, the wizard. When "Taffy," that splendid type of British athlete, had linked his strong arm into the arms of Poynter and Whistler and Du Maurier, he began unwittingly a story that ended twenty years later under the same flowering trees of the Champs Élysées; a tale that was continued and deftly woven by the graceful hands of his then unborn daughters, who came, as the Three Graces, to lead the way through the
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