On one occasion, I went to see him and found him boiling over with anger surrounded by masterpieces which he had just cut to ribbons in a storm of mad fury lest they should fall into the hands of the bailiffs; and all for a miserable debt of thirty pounds, which, for the moment, he was unable to pay. There they lay in strips—portraits, nocturnes, harmonies, symphonies, gems which now, after a lapse of from thirty to forty years, would be worth many thousand pounds. Any one of his friends would have lent him the money over and over again, but he was as proud as Lucifer, the devil entered his soul, and the art tragedy was consummated. The blow hit me cruelly, for he had just finished a beautiful portrait of my wife; what it must have meant for Whistler himself nobody ever knew; but when he cooled down among the ruins it must have been misery, for he was as confident as Thucydides himself of the value of his own work. But how lucky it was that neither the Mother nor the Carlyle were included in that massacre of the innocents—surely two of the most reverent portraits that genius ever produced. Whistler’s hospitality was great—his Sunday luncheons (breakfasts he called them) were perfect; he had an excellent cook, who, with her husband, made up the household, and there were constant little surprise dishes over which he would chuckle and linger till late in the afternoon; as Amphitryon, he was the embodiment of human happiness—sitting at the head of his table dispensing quaint cates and still quainter sayings—barbed arrows sometimes—he was a sight for gods and men; the talk was always good, for he had the knack of surrounding himself with all manner of clever people—but, as was once told of Kinglake, no matter how many good things might be said, his were sure to be the best. The lightning flashes of his wit—his epigrams—were matchless. They were like the sting in the tail of his emblematic butterfly, an insect unknown to mere vulgar entomologists. I once or twice met Oscar Wilde there, and a set-to between that big fat man and the little gnome-like Whistler was certainly good to listen to—but the lightweight always carried off the belt. Charles Keene, whose black and white sketches for _Punch_ were Whistler’s admiration, was a frequent guest. He was a tall, solemn-looking Don Quixote who used to wander through the suburbs dressed as a _rapin_ should be in a loose jacket and slouch hat, with a black cutty pipe always in his mouth, and a satchel hanging from his shoulders. He had a dry, racy humour of his own, which worked in well with the salad of wit at the table.