By and by I shall get out of these confusions, and then it will be plain sailing; but first-off the confusions were natural and not to be avoided. My reputation came very suddenly and tumultuously when I published my own portrait, and it turned my head a little, for indeed there was never anything like it. In a single day I got orders from sixty-two people not to paint their portraits, some of them the most distinguished persons in the country--the President, the Cabinet, authors, governors, admirals, candidates for office on the weak side--almost everybody that was anybody, and it would really have turned the head of nearly any beginner to get so much notice and have it come with such a frenzy of cordiality. But I am growing calm and settling down to business, now; and pretty soon I shall cease to be flurried, and then when I do a portrait I shall be quite at myself and able on the instant to tell it from the others and pick it out when wanted. I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study--just a mere study, a few apparently random lines--and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself. Take this picture, for instance: [Illustration: FIRST YOU THINK IT’S DANTE; NEXT YOU THINK IT’S EMERSON; THEN YOU THINK IT’S WAYNE MAC VEAGH. YET IT ISN’T ANY OF THEM; IT’S THE BEGINNINGS OF DEPEW ] First you think it’s Dante; next you think it’s Emerson; then you think it’s Wayne Mac Veagh. Yet it isn’t any of them; it’s the beginnings of Depew. Now you wouldn’t believe Depew could be devolved out of that; yet the minute it is finished here you have him to the life, and you say, yourself, “If that isn’t Depew it isn’t anybody.” Some would have painted him speaking, but he isn’t always speaking, he has to stop and think sometimes. That is a _genre_ picture, as we say in the trade, and differs from the encaustic and other schools in various ways, mainly technical, which you wouldn’t understand if I should explain them to you. But you will get the idea as I go along, and little by little you will learn all that is valuable about Art without knowing how it happened, and without any sense of strain or effort, and then you will know what school a picture belongs to, just at a glance, and whether it is an animal picture or a landscape. It is then that the joy of life will begin for you. When you come to examine my portraits of Mr. Joe Jefferson and the rest, your eye will have become measurably educated by that time, and you will recognize at once that no two of them are alike. I will close the present chapter with an example of the nude, for your instruction.