ral rule he could never be
persuaded to work unless he was drunk. He did his best pictures when he
was drunk."

"_Emu._ Artists are never drunk."

"Quite right. I'll show you a sword-guard that he designed. All the
best artists out here do a lot of designing. K---- used to fritter away
his time on designs for old friends. Had he stuck to pictures he could
have made twice as much. But he never turned out potboilers. When you go
to Tokio, make it your business to get two little books of his called
_Drunken Sketches_--pictures that he did, when he was--_emu_. There is
enough dash and go in them to fill half a dozen studios. An English
artist studied under him for some time. But K----'s touch was not
communicable, though he might have taught his pupil something about
technique. Have you ever come across one of K----'s crows? You could
tell it anywhere. He could put all the wicked thoughts that ever came
into the mind of a crow--and a crow is first cousin to the Devil--on a
piece of paper six inches square, with a brush of Indian ink and two
turns of his wrist. Look at the sword-guard I spoke of. How is that for
feeling?"

On a circular piece of iron four inches in diameter and pierced by the
pole for the tang of the blade, poor K----, who died last Friday, had
sketched the figure of a coolie trying to fold up a cloth which was
bellying to a merry breeze--not a cold wind, but a sportive summer gust.
The coolie was enjoying the performance, and so was the cloth. It would
all be folded up in another minute and the coolie would go on his way
with a grin.

This thing had K---- conceived, and the faithful workman executed, with
the lightest touches of the graver, to the end that it might lie in a
collector's cabinet in London.

"Wah! Wah!" I said, and returned it reverently. "It would kill a man who
could do that to live after his touch had gone. Well for him he
died--but I wish I had seen him. Show me some more."

"I've got a painting by Hokusai--the great artist who lived at the end
of the last century and the beginning of this. Even _you_ have heard of
Hokusai, haven't you?"

"A little. I have heard it was impossible to get a genuine painting with
his signature attached."

"That's true; but I've shown this one to the Japanese Government expert
in pictures--the man the Mikado consults in cases of doubt--to the first
European authority on Japanese art, and of course I have my own opinion
to back the signed guarantee o