Meanwhile it was obvious that a studio and one bedroom would not be sufficient accommodation, and Jimmie, greatly daring, took a house. He also engaged a resident housekeeper for himself and a respectable cat for Aline, and when he had settled down, after having spent every penny he could scrape together on furniture, began to wonder how he could pay the rent. A month or two before he would have as soon thought of buying a palace in Park Lane as renting a house in St. John's Wood--a cheap, shabby little house, it is true; but still a house, with drawing-room, dining-room, bedrooms, and a studio built over the space where once the garden tried to smile. He wandered through it with a wonderment quite as childish as that of Aline, who had helped him to buy the furniture. But how was he ever going to pay the rent? After a time he ceased asking the question. The ravens that fed Elijah provided him with the twenty quarterly pieces of gold. Picture-dealers of every hue and grade supplied him with the wherewithal to live. In those early days he penetrated most of the murky byways of his art--alleys he would have passed by with pinched nose a year before, when an empty pocket and an empty stomach concerned himself alone. Now, when the money for the last picture had gone, and no more was forthcoming by way of advance on royalties on plates, and the black and white market was congested, he did amazing things. He copied old Masters for a red-faced, beery print-seller in Frith Street, who found some mysterious market for them. The price can be gauged by the fact that years afterwards Jimmie recognised one of his own copies in an auction room, and heard it knocked down as a genuine Velasquez for eleven shillings and sixpence. He also painted oil landscapes for a dealer who did an immense trade in this line, selling them to drapers and fancy-warehousemen, who in their turn retailed them to an art-loving public, framed in gold, at one and eleven pence three farthings; and the artist's rate of payment was five shillings a dozen--panels supplied, but not the paint. To see Jimmie attack these was the child Aline's delight. In after years she wept in a foolish way over the memory. He would do half a dozen at a time: first dash in the foregrounds, either meadows or stretches of shore, then wash in bold, stormy skies, then a bit of water, smooth or rugged according as it was meant to represent pool or sea; then a few vigorous strokes would put in a ship and a lighthouse on one panel, a tree and a cow on a second, a woman and a cottage on a third. And all the time, as he worked at lightning speed, he would laugh and joke with the child, who sat fascinated by the magic with which each mysterious mass of daubs and smudges grew into a living picture under his hand. When his invention was at a loss, he would call upon her to suggest accessories; and if she cried out “windmill,” suddenly there would spring from under the darting brush-point a mill