It was a chapter of accidents bearing pain and long long trial to me. The earliest part of my work was the sketching in of the whole composition and the painting of the background. No test of the suitability of my surface could have been more satisfactory as far as was needed for the point reached. I almost dismissed anxiety about the final results, and I had advanced considerably with my work before the missing boxes arrived. It seemed a great and needless waste to recommence my labours when so much apparently had been done. It would have been well for me, however, had I thrown all my work aside, and begun again, and this indeed it would have been even years later, for from the moment when I suspected with what fatal consequences my first start had been beset, until the moment, when in England, at the end of 1882, I gave up the picture, I always had reason to persuade myself that a little more patience――perhaps even the perseverance further of two more weeks――might overcome the difficulty intervening between the stage arrived at and the entire completion of the picture. I will not weary the reader with a statement of all the vexatious incidents of my trouble, but it is only a needful excuse for me to state that a studio built specially for me by German instead of Arab builders, let in the rain as though the roof had been made of open wire, and that when this worry had passed, I was under summons to come back to London by a certain date, and this made the difficulty greater of deliberately estimating the amount of danger which I incurred in advancing my work on the imperfect surface.