"Quite right. I'll show you a sword-guard that he designed. All the best artists out here do a lot of designing. K---- used to fritter away his time on designs for old friends. Had he stuck to pictures he could have made twice as much. But he never turned out potboilers. When you go to Tokio, make it your business to get two little books of his called _Drunken Sketches_--pictures that he did, when he was--_ému_. There is enough dash and go in them to fill half a dozen studios. An English artist studied under him for some time. But K----'s touch was not communicable, though he might have taught his pupil something about technique. Have you ever come across one of K----'s crows? You could tell it anywhere. He could put all the wicked thoughts that ever came into the mind of a crow--and a crow is first cousin to the Devil--on a piece of paper six inches square, with a brush of Indian ink and two turns of his wrist. Look at the sword-guard I spoke of. How is that for feeling?" On a circular piece of iron four inches in diameter and pierced by the pole for the tang of the blade, poor K----, who died last Friday, had sketched the figure of a coolie trying to fold up a cloth which was bellying to a merry breeze--not a cold wind, but a sportive summer gust. The coolie was enjoying the performance, and so was the cloth. It would all be folded up in another minute and the coolie would go on his way with a grin. This thing had K---- conceived, and the faithful workman executed, with the lightest touches of the graver, to the end that it might lie in a collector's cabinet in London. "Wah! Wah!" I said, and returned it reverently. "It would kill a man who could do that to live after his touch had gone. Well for him he died--but I wish I had seen him. Show me some more." "I've got a painting by Hokusai--the great artist who lived at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. Even _you_ have heard of Hokusai, haven't you?" "A little. I have heard it was impossible to get a genuine painting with his signature attached." "That's true; but I've shown this one to the Japanese Government expert in pictures--the man the Mikado consults in cases of doubt--to the first European authority on Japanese art, and of course I have my own opinion to back the signed guarantee of the seller. Look!" He unrolled a silk-scroll and showed me the figure of a girl in pale blue and grey crêpe, carrying in her arms a bundle of clothes that, as the tub behind her showed, had just been washed. A dark-blue handkerchief was thrown lightly over the left forearm, shoulder, and neck, ready to tie up the clothes when the bundle should be put down. The flesh of the right arm showed through the thin drapery of the sleeve. The right hand merely steadied the bundle from above; the left gripped it firmly from below. Through the stiff blue-black hair showed the outline of the left ear.