in the World and sought our
adventure by proclaiming the fact in print. But our discoveries might
have been greater, our adventures more daring, and I should be silent
about them now for quite another and far more sensible reason, and this
is that I was not silent at the time. The tale of those old days is
told.

II

Other journeys I made had no less an air of holiday-taking and meant no
less hard labour. For most men work is bounded by the four walls of the
office or the factory, or the shop, or the school, and rigidly regulated
by hours, and they consequently suspect the amateur or the dawdler in
the artist or writer who works where and when and as he pleases.
Journalism has led me into pleasant places but never by the path of
idleness. Rare has been the month of May that has not found me in Paris,
not for the sunshine and gaiety that draw the tourist to it in that gay
sunlit season, but for industrious days, with my eyes and catalogue and
note-book, in the _Salons_. Few have been the International Exhibitions,
from Glasgow to Ghent, from Antwerp to Venice, that I have missed, and
if in my devoted attendance I might easily have been mistaken for the
tireless pleasure-seeker, if I got what fun I could at odd moments out
of my opportunities, never was I without my inseparable note-book and
pencil in my hand or in my pocket, never without good, long, serious
articles to be written in my hotel bedroom. Even in London when I might
have passed for the idlest stroller along Bond Street or Piccadilly on
an idle afternoon, oftener than not I have been bound for a gallery
somewhere with the prospect of long hours' writing as the result of it.
But though the task varied, the tale of these days as well has been
told, and has duly appeared in the long columns of many a paper, in the
long articles of many a magazine.

III

As time went on, my journeys were fewer and J. took his oftener by
himself. A new variety of task was set me that left so little leisure
for the galleries that I gave up "doing" them for my London papers. My
days went to the making of books which, whether I wrote them alone or in
collaboration with J., required my undivided attention. When these were
such books as the Life of My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, or the Life
of Whistler, they called for research, days of reading in the Art
Library at South Kensington, the British Museum, the London Library,
days of seeing people and places, days of travellin