“When the man first appeared he tried to wear his hat in the drawing-room and smoke about the house. Whistler soon settled that. He went out into the hall and fetched a stick, and daintily knocked the man’s hat off. The man was so surprised that he forgot to be angry, and within a day or two he had been trained to wait at table. One morning, when Mr. Whistler was shaving, a message was brought up that the man (he was always known in the house as ‘the man,’ as if he were the only one of his species) wanted to speak to him. “‘Very well, send him up,’ said Mr. Whistler. He went on shaving, and when the man came in said, abruptly, ‘Now, then, what do you want?’ “‘I want my money, sir.’ “‘What money?’ “‘My possession money, sir.’ “‘What, haven’t they given it to you?’ “‘No, sir; it’s you that have to give it to me.’ “‘Oh, the deuce I have!’ And Mr. Whistler laughingly gave him to understand that, if he wanted money, his only chance was to apply elsewhere. “‘Well, I think it’s very hard, sir,’ the man began to snivel; ‘I have my own family to keep, and my own rent to pay----’ “‘I’ll tell you what I advise you to do,’ Mr. Whistler returned, as he gently pushed him out of the room: ‘you should do as I do, and have “a man” in your own house.’ “Soon after this the man came and said that if he was not paid he would have to put bills up outside the house announcing a sale. And, sure enough, a few days after great posters were stuck up all over the front of the house, announcing so many tables, and so many chairs, and so much old Nankin china for sale on a given day. Mr. Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and hastened to send out invitations to all his friends to a luncheon-party, adding, as a postscript, ‘You will know the house by the bills of sale stuck up outside.’ And the bailiff proved an admirable butler, and the party one of the merriest ever known.”[21] The “White House” was finally sold, and it is said that when he moved out he wrote on the wall, “Except the Lord build the house, their labor is in vain that build it,--E. W. Godwin, R.S.A., built this one.” Speaking of architects, the story is told that he was once dining, and dining well, at the house of a friend in London. Towards the end of the dinner he was obliged to leave the table and run up-stairs to write a note. In a few moments a great noise was heard in the hall, and Whistler was found to have fallen down the stairs. “Who is your architect?” he asked. His host told him. “I might have known it; the ---- teetotaler!” By the irony of fate the “White House” was afterwards occupied and much altered by the detested critic of the _Times_,--detested possibly because he occupied and dared to alter the house,--and Whistler asked: “Shall the birthplace of art become the tomb of its parasite?”