atronise
London. There was something in the fellow's look which invited me,
and when I got into conversation with him, I learned that nothing but
jealousy had kept him from taking a high place as a scene-painter, and
that artists of far less merit than himself had a place, year after
year, on the line at the Academy. Where he had picked up his phrases
it was of course impossible to guess, but he talked a good deal of the
dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, which resulted from his
artistic occupation.

He had one awful daub which he called "The Guardship Attacked," in
which was depicted a vessel, broadside on to the spectator, wedged very
tightly into the sea and sky of an impossible blue, with little pills of
white smoke clinging to a porthole here and there. This work he told me
was his "chef de hover," and he volunteered to furnish me with a copy of
it on cardboard for half a crown, and to deliver it at my lodgings for
his 'bus fare and a drink. I closed with that proposal and in a week's
time he brought the work to me. My chum's painting tools and easels were
scattered about the room in which I received him, and a dozen or so of
sketches in various stages of progress were propped up on the buffet and
the mantelpiece. He surveyed these with an ineffable sniff and said:
"Oh! I perceive you are a brother of the brush." I took him outside to
give him his promised drink and found that he was accompanied by an
elderly, bearded, incredibly dirty man, who dealt in chick-weed, and
who shared his room with him in Gees Court, Oxford Street. This fearsome
person was absolutely alive with vermin and his unkempt grey beard was
as the wrinkled sea. The pavement artist ordered a drink for him at my
expense and when he had consumed it, he told me that I was a patron
of the arts and wanted to embrace me. I held him off by the aid of
an umbrella, and his companion told me that he had been a beneficed
clergyman of the Church of England, and a companion for dukes and
princes. However that might have been, the wretch had certainly the
unmistakable _no_ accent of a gentleman and spoke with a certain beery
eloquence which reminded one of poor Tom Robertson's Eccles.

My acquaintance with these gentlemen led me to a somewhat familiar
knowledge of Gee's Court I have not been near the place now for more
than thirty years and, for aught I know to the contrary, it may long
since have been wiped out of existence. But when I knew it it w