We chatted on about many subjects, and when the conversation turned on Velasquez, whose wonderful pictures I had visited in Madrid only a few months before, Cunninghame Graham waxed warm. Although descended from a stock old as any in Scotland, his mother (or his grandmother) was a Spaniard, and there is clearly some of the warm Southern blood in his veins. He speaks Spanish with a charming accent, and has the true Castilian lisp and pretty intonation. In the ’nineties I was riding along the shore in Tangier with W. B. Harris, _The Times_ correspondent, Sir Rubert Boyce, of the Liverpool University, and the late Mr. Russell Roberts, a well-known barrister, when we saw two men riding towards us. One of them was performing all sorts of wild antics upon his steed, standing on the saddle and waving his whip in the air. As he galloped towards us I thought he must be a cowboy let loose, but as he came nearer he looked like a picture of Charles V painted by Velasquez which had stepped out of its frame. The tawny hue of his clothes, the brown leather of his boots, the loose shirt, the large brown felt sombrero, and the pointed brown-grey beard seemed familiar, and as the man drew nearer I discovered it was Mr. Cunninghame Graham, with whom was Will Rothenstein. The next night I heard this descendant of old Scotland’s shores expounding Socialism to a handful of Arabs in Spanish. Well, well, Mr. Graham has his foibles; but he is doubtless the most brilliant short story writer in our language; and as fine a rider as any I ever saw on the open prairie catching wild bulls for the ring. Cunninghame Graham is a strange personality; he is an artistic being, and Mr. Lavery’s portrait of him is inimitable. It has been exhibited all over the world and is well known. Suddenly Cunninghame Graham exclaimed, “Twenty-seven minutes are up.” “All right!” replied the painter. “Let me know when the next three have gone.” “Thirty minutes, my friend. Time is up.” Lavery looked round at me, smiling. “Done. I shan’t touch it any more. You allowed me thirty minutes, but you must let me have a moment over-time to add your name to the canvas, and then you may take it home with you.” And I did so. In 1910, that canvas appeared at the Exhibition of Fair Women at the Grafton Gallery, and a month or two later to my surprise I found it reproduced in a large volume of works by Scottish artists published in Edinburgh, under the title, _Modern Scottish Portrait Painters_, by Percy Bate. So much is John Lavery appreciated abroad that his most famous pictures hang in Pittsburg and Philadelphia in the United States; in the Pinakothek, Munich; the National Gallery of Brussels, the Luxembourg in Paris, the Modern Gallery of Venice, the National Gallery of Berlin, although a few have luckily been gleaned by the public galleries of Glasgow and Edinburgh.