The furniture amounted to nothing: a table near the far side, where he lunched, an old sofa against the wall under the skylight, two or three old French chairs, his easel and palette. There was a high stove near the door,--one of those French complications intended for the generation of a maximum of heat with a minimum consumption of precious coal. Like most labor-saving devices, it required some skill for its management, and Whistler was not a mechanic. One cold day it was only too apparent the stove needed encouragement, and the sitter suggested that the damper be opened,--in fact, started to open it himself, when Whistler, greatly alarmed, exclaimed: “God bless me! but you must not touch that; the last time I meddled with it, the fire went out. There is only one man in Paris who understands that stove.” “Well, where is he?” “Dear me, I discharged him to-day. How unlucky.” “Then, we must seize the stove by the horns and take our chances on the consequences.” And throwing the damper wide open, there was soon a blazing fire. * * * * * For work outside, Whistler used a very small palette of the usual form; in his studio he carried no palette whatsoever, but used in lieu thereof a rectangular table that resembled a writing-desk. The top sloped slightly; at the left were tubes of colors, at the right one or two bowls containing oil and turpentine, with which the colors when mixed were reduced so thin that they would run on the sloping top of the table. He relied upon innumerable coats of thin color to secure the desired effect rather than upon one or two coats of greater consistency. This made the work long and tedious as compared with the modern mode of taking the pigments as they squirm from the tubes and pasting them while yet alive on the canvas; but it has undoubtedly given his pictures a permanency and durability far beyond that of others. He seldom began to arrange his palette until the model or sitter was in pose; and ten or fifteen minutes were not infrequently spent in getting palette and brushes to suit him. To a model paid by the hour this delay was of no concern, but to the unpractised sitter, whose limit of endurance and patience did not exceed an hour, the time spent in setting the palette seemed unduly long and altogether wasted. But all that was a part of the refinement of Whistler’s art. So susceptible was his color-sense that he could not mix colors to suit him unless canvas and sitter were before him precisely as they would be when he began to paint. The arrangement of the colors on the palette was but preliminary to placing those same colors on the canvas, therefore the sitter was as essential to the one process as the other. * * * * *