“What I think I like best”--and he tapped his snuff-box in a meditative way--“is to get an old, decayed, hopeless story, and restore it. Breaking out a window here, adding a porch there, opening up a room, and touching up the walls--it is marvellous what can be done. Besides new drains,” he added, with significance, “the sanitary state of some of those old stories is awful. You feel the atmosphere at the door--quite intolerable, and indeed dangerous.” “Then you do not think that indecency...?” “No, nor profanity. Both are bad art; they are cheap expedients, like strong sauces to cover bad cooking. It sounds like boasting, but I have redeemed one or two very unpleasant tales, which otherwise had been uninhabitable, if I may trifle again with my little figure, and now are charming.” “You rather lean, one would gather, to old tales, while some of the younger men are terrified of telling a 'chestnut,' always prefacing, 'This must be well known, but it is new to me; say at once if you have heard it.'” “Most humiliating, and quite unworthy of an artist. Heard it before!” and the old gentleman was full of scorn. “Imagine a painter apologizing for having taken a bend of the Thames or a Highland glen some man had used before. Of course, if one makes a copy of a picture and exhibits it as his own, that is fraud, and the work is certain to be poor. One must respect another artist's labour, which is the ground of his copyright. But if one makes a 'bit' of life as old as Aristophanes or Horace his own, by passing it through his own fancy and turning it out in his own style, then it is ever new. Then there is the telling! There are musicians who can compose, but who cannot play, and _vice versâ_. So with our art, there are story-tellers and story-makers. The former can suffer no wrong, for they are self-protected, but the latter have never been protected as they deserve in the fruit of their brains. You will see at once that, if I am right, the ownership of an anecdote is quite beyond dispute. The original material is really for the most part common property, and usually very poor property--prairie land, in fact. Personal rights come in when one has put capital into the land, has cleared and ploughed and sown it; then it's his own, and he is entitled to fence it, and he cannot be dispossessed except on fair terms.” “Which would be?” “Well, that depends. He might sell to an editor, or he might give the use of it to a friend. Personally, as an artist of now thirty years' standing, I do not part with my work; it may be an old-fashioned prejudice, but I don't like to let it go to the public.” “But to a friend?”