MR. GLADSTONE
tion by the critics, which followed his slight, airy, and fantastic imaginations, nocturnes in blue and gold, he aptly described the process as "crushing a butterfly on the wheel." Here then was the giddy and insouciant creature of the scent-laden ether drawn down to suffer one of the heaviest and cruellest punishments devised by the ingenuity of those other creatures who are said to be a little lower than the angels. The happy allusion gave the great master his monogram, but he added a sting to the tail—another of his facetious ways of saying that "nature is looking up."
The butterfly you are to hear about is of another sort, one of those fluttering pale things, like the petals of an evening primrose, that joyously disport themselves among the chestnut-trees of the Champs Élysées, in that atmosphere only found in Paris when Spring has dressed the gay city in tones of tender green under the genial skies of May. Onslow Ford and I, with other painters and sculptors, were in the habit of making annual pilgrimages to Paris to see the Salon. In those days the exhibition was held in the Palais de l'Industrie; the new Salon, of the secessionists—for there must be revolutionaries in Art as well as in religion and politics—was housed in the building at the Champs de Mars.
As Ford and I were walking up the right side of the avenue in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe, he called my attention to the coveys of primrose-yellow butterflies, and said, "Whenever one of these floats down and alights on my coat or hat, it is an omen of good fortune, not to me, but to the man who happens to be walking with me. If one should alight on me now, you will get a medal or something," adding rather sadly, "I never get anything." He had hardly finished speaking when one of the graceful insects settled composedly on the lapel of his coat, and
49
