His studio was in Great Ormond Street, and next door to the Working Men’s College, where he had got to know the Rev. F. D. Maurice and the Rev. Charles Kingsley. Of the latter broad-minded Broad Churchman he had several stories. One only can I recall. Kingsley had felt called upon to reprove a parishioner of his on a growing spirit of miserliness which he was exhibiting. The fellow was well off, a widower, and living alone. He was denying himself the necessaries of life, when his Rector thought it time to remonstrate. But the old man was immune against reason, or, rather, he had an objection to every argument urged by his spiritual adviser. At last Kingsley took him on lower ground. The old fellow had an only son. He was a sailor and a notoriously free-handed young man. “This money,” urged the Rector, “which you are hoarding, and which you might employ so usefully, will come at last to your boy, who will fling it about with both hands.” “Ah, well,” observed the unrepentant niggard, “if Jim has on’y half the pleasure a-spendin’ on it as I’ve had a-savin’ on it, I wholly envy ’im—that ’a do.” A congregation composed of rustics of that type must have been a bit of a trial to a man of Kingsley’s optimistic temperament. But, then, his reverence was also endowed with the saving grace of humour. I suppose the hatchment habit—which had persisted for so many generations—had fallen into a rapid decline just about this period, for my cheery little landlord had but lately taken to letting apartments. The income from heraldic painting had ceased to prove sufficient for the upkeep of a big house. The old gentleman’s housekeepers were a wife and daughter, whose second-hand acquaintance with the heraldry of the great had induced the belief that, if not actually “in Society,” they were very much in touch with it. Their conversation was studded with allusions to “Lady This” and “Lord That.” It was some time before I discovered that their constant conversational appeals to “the Dook,” a personage with whom, it might appear, they lived on terms of considerable intimacy, was His Grace the Duke of Bedford. Their supposed friendship with that nobleman rested solely on the circumstance that His Grace was the ground landlord of the premises in which they lived. “I shall certainly speak to the Dook about it,” or, “You must reelly write to His Grace, my dear,” were tit-bits that were served up to me _ad nauseam_ when—as would sometimes be the case—I was asked to join the ladies at five o’clock tea. In his reminiscences of “the nobs,” as the Upper Ten were then called, the hatchment painter himself betrayed no snobbishness whatever. He related anecdotes of his noble employers, just as he would tell a “good thing” about a divine, or an actor, or an artist.