One day the conversation turned on health and nostrums; “Well,” said Don Quixote, “I think that if a man is ill there is only one thing for him to do; he must give up smoking for a fortnight.” “Yes! but supposing he don’t smoke?” asked I. “Then I don’t know what he is to do.” Having uttered these words with pious gravity Charles Keene retired behind his pipe and once more became a listener. There was another very agreeable scoundrel, the sort of man who has done everything and been everywhere, a capital foil to the others. But one fine day he disappeared. Whistler had found him out. There are not a few men of that sort who contrive to make a living in some way out of art and artists. But they seldom last long. I shall never forget that man’s account of the recovery of Rossetti’s poems. When his wife died the great artist in his misery had laid the MS. in her coffin as a last loving gift—they were hers, he said, and she should keep them. Always being urged to regain them, he in the end yielded. The needful authority was obtained, and in the dead of night Rossetti with a friend went to the cemetery. The coffin was exhumed and opened, the lovely hair which his paintings had made famous rippled out in waves. The MS. all stained with the horrors of death, lying on her bosom, was reverently secured and the coffin fastened down again. A weird story, but the poems were saved. There came a day when, to my great regret, Whistler made up his mind to leave the old house in which he had lived for eleven years and to build the “White House” in Tite Street, mainly prompted, as he told me, by the wish to show what he could achieve in decoration. E. W. Godwin was the architect and it was not long before they quarrelled over the work, in commemoration of which Whistler caused a stone to be inserted in the front of the house, engraved with the words, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it—E. W. Godwin F.S.A. built this house.” The stone has long since disappeared. Godwin died in 1886 and in 1888 Whistler married his widow. A quaint ending to an artistic feud. Unlike the great plagiarist Oscar Wilde, Whistler was always original. He was himself, he imitated nobody. The other man, brilliantly clever as he undoubtedly was, never hesitated to copy. Both were startling and audacious in their dress; but Whistler in his long coat, playing with a slender Wanghai cane as tall as himself, his little white plume standing up in the midst of his black, or blackened, hair, was unlike anything or anybody else. He was delicate, playful, whimsical, a creature of fancy.