little back parlor in the squalid little house in which we lived, and there he would work in a frenzy for days together. He would emerge with his nerves in rags, his skin pale, his eyes bloodshot, his linen foul, his clothes and person in disorder, yet under his arm was a new masterpiece, twelve inches by sixteen, which he would carry round to a dealer, who would bully and browbeat him, and screw him down to the last shilling, which he already owed for the rent. He would return home worn out in mind and body by his labors; and for weeks he was unable to bear the sight of a brush or a skin of paint. It was then he would seek to assuage his morbid irritation with the aid of drink. 'They will place a tablet over this hovel when I am dead,' he would say, 'but while I am alive the rope which is needed to hang me outbuys the worth of this tattered carcass.'
"My poor father, rare artist as he was, was right in this estimate of himself. As a man, as a father, as a citizen, I cannot find a word to say for him. He never brought a moment of happiness to either of his girls. He dwelt in a world of his own; a beautiful and enchanted world, the Promised Land of his art. He was a man of strange ambition; of an ambition that had something ferocious in it; of an ambition that was unfitted to cope with the sordid and material aims, by whose aid persons of not one-tenth part of his quality achieved wealth, respectability, power, and the fame of the passing hour. There was a thread of noble austerity in my poor father's genius, which remained in it, like a vein of gold embedded in the mud of a polluted river, throughout the whole
