learnt the facts.

Those that I have now are fragmentary. I am in the position
of a biologist who from a single bone must reconstruct not
only the appearance of an extinct animal, but its habits.
Strickland made no particular impression on the people who
came in contact with him in Tahiti. To them he was no more
than a beach-comber in constant need of money, remarkable only
for the peculiarity that he painted pictures which seemed to
them absurd; and it was not till he had been dead for some
years and agents came from the dealers in Paris and Berlin to
look for any pictures which might still remain on the island,
that they had any idea that among them had dwelt a man of consequence.
They remembered then that they could have bought for
a song canvases which now were worth large sums, and they
could not forgive themselves for the opportunity which had
escaped them. There was a Jewish trader called Cohen, who had
come by one of Strickland's pictures in a singular way.
He was a little old Frenchman, with soft kind eyes and a pleasant
smile, half trader and half seaman, who owned a cutter in
which he wandered boldly among the Paumotus and the Marquesas,
taking out trade goods and bringing back copra, shell, and pearls.
I went to see him because I was told he had a large black
pearl which he was willing to sell cheaply, and when I
discovered that it was beyond my means I began to talk to him
about Strickland. He had known him well.

"You see, I was interested in him because he was a painter,"
he told me. "We don't get many painters in the islands, and I
was sorry for him because he was such a bad one. I gave him
his first job. I had a plantation on the peninsula, and I
wanted a white overseer. You never get any work out of the
natives unless you have a white man over them. I said to him:
'You'll have plenty of time for painting, and you can earn a
bit of money.' I knew he was starving, but I offered him good wages."

"I can't imagine that he was a very satisfactory overseer,"
I said, smiling.

"I made allowances. I have always had a sympathy for artists.
It is in our blood, you know. But he only remained a few
months. When he had enough money to buy paints and canvases
he left me. The place had got hold of him by then, and he
wanted to get away into the bush. But I continued to see him
now and then. He would turn up in Papeete every few months
and stay a little while; he'd get money out of someone or
o