e taken with its
finishing. Also, she inquired if it could, without danger of injury,
be shipped.

"Why?" asked Whistler.

"Because I wish to send it to my home in Chicago," explained Miss
Peck.

Whistler threw down his brush, overturned the easel, and ran around
the studio like a madman. "What!" he shrieked. "Send a Whistler to
Chicago! Allow one of my paintings to enter Hog Town! Never!"

Miss Peck didn't get the painting.

* * * * *

Once he met what seemed to be a crushing retort. He had scornfully
called Balaam's ass the first great critic, and the inference was
plain until a writer in _Vanity Fair_ called his attention to the fact
that the ass was right.

Whistler acknowledged the point. But the acknowledgment terminates in
a way that is delicious. "I fancy you will admit that this is the only
ass on record who ever did 'see the Angel of the Lord,' and that we
are past the age of miracles."

Even in defeat he was triumphant.

* * * * *

Whistler found that Mortimer Menpes, once his very dear friend,
sketched in Chelsea. "How dare you sketch in my Chelsea?" he
indignantly demanded.

A vigorous attack on Mr. Menpes then followed in the press. One of the
first articles began in this style, Menpes, of course, being an
Australian: "I can only liken him to his native kangaroo--a robber by
birth--born with a pocket!" "He is the claimant of lemon yellow"--a
color to which Mr. Whistler deemed he had the sole right; and when he
thought he had pulverized him in the press (it was soon after the
Parnell Commission, when Pigott, the informer, had committed suicide
in Spain), Whistler one evening thrust this pleasant note into Mr.
Menpes's letter-box, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, with the
well-known butterfly cipher attached:

"You will blow your brains out, of course. Pigott has shown you what
to do under the circumstances, and you know the way to Spain.
Good-by!"

Speaking at a meeting held to complete the details of a movement for
the erection of a memorial to Whistler, Lord Redesdale gave a
remarkable account of the artist's methods of work. "One day when he
was to begin a portrait of a lady," said Lord Redesdale, "the painter
took up his position at one end of the room, with his sitter and
canvas at the other. For a long time he stood looking at her, holding
in his hand a huge brush as a man would use to whitewash a house.
Suddenly he ra