These were very turbulent days, and Mr. Burns had figured in the Trafalgar Square riots. Shipowners and shipbuilders--and everybody, I imagine, having more than £500 a year--were the objects of his implacable distrust. He was a younger and poorer man then. Mr. Burns wore the blue reefer suit which had survived the jostlings of many a crowd, but he did not bring to my studio the famous straw hat of which so much was written in the Press at that time. When I spoke to him about the hat he rather fenced the question, and to this day I believe that hat to be somewhere in Mr. Burns’s possession as a treasured souvenir of his stressful past. I have never seen Mr. Burns wearing any other kind of clothes than blue serge. I struck a bargain with the dockers’ champion that he should let me have the suit he was wearing with which to clothe his portrait in the Exhibition, and so complete the realism of the model. Mr. Burns demurred at first, and then it appeared he had an extremely good reason for doing so. It was the only suit he possessed, and we agreed that I should have it as soon as I provided him with a new one to take its place on his own back. Mr. Burns told the story of this transaction in reply to an interrupter at a public meeting. “Where did you get that suit?” asked the interrogator. “I got it,” said Mr. Burns frankly, “from Madame Tussaud’s. When my portrait was put in the Exhibition you may, or you may not, have noticed that it was wearing my old suit. As I had no other clothes the management gave me the suit I am wearing now, and I hope you will agree that I made a pretty good bargain.” The audience cheered the speaker and booed the heckler. Mr. Burns’s portrait has been brought up to date since then, but it still wears the old reefer suit, and the fact of this being out of the fashion and rather skimpy only adds to the effectiveness of the picture by recalling the working man the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman raised to Cabinet rank. They tell me Mr. Burns is getting white, but when I modelled him his hair was black and plentiful. _Judy_ commemorated the suit incident in the following verse, depicting Burns making figure eights on the ice: ’Ave ye seen Johnny Burns Strikin’ figgers on the hice? ’Ave ye seen his twists and turns?-- Sure, an’ can’t he do it nice! In his Tussaud’s suit of navy blue ’N’ his famous old straw hat, With his Hacmes ’n’ his knobstick too, A reg’lar ’ristocrat! A contrast to Mr. Burns, though possibly of similar socialistic opinions, was Mr. George Bernard Shaw, whom I long wanted to sit to me. I had not made the acquaintance of the brilliant satirist, and somehow hesitated about approaching him. Eventually I wrote to Mr. Shaw making known my wish, and, without delay, I received from him a good-humoured letter, in which he said that it would give him much pleasure to “join the company of the Immortals.”