From that moment I cared for neither praise nor blame. The opinion of
men affected me not at all. My gift was mine, and I knew it. I held it
straight from the Divine hands. I had the Divine promise with me for
as long as I should live on this earth.

And I was filled with a boundless delight in life and my own powers.

When I showed my original pictures all painted under inspiration to my
father, he carefully put on his pince-nez and studied them very
closely. After that he said he must reserve his judgment. When they
went to the Academy and were promptly refused, he drew a long face and
said I had better have gone into the Indian Civil Service as he
wished. Subsequently, when I had sold them all, and not one for less
than a thousand guineas, he began to enter upon a placid state of
contentment with me which induced him to say to other captious
relations--"Let the boy alone, he will be an artist some day." At
which I used to laugh inwardly and go away to my studio to listen to
the Divine voice dictating fresh pictures to me. For five years in
Italy I had studied closely and worked unremittingly, keeping myself
for my art alone and existing only in it. My teachers had called me
industrious. Another phrase which always must make an artist laugh
when applied to his art.

To those who know the wild pleasure, the almost mad joy of exercising
a really natural gift, it sounds as funny as to talk of a drunkard
industriously getting drunk.

However, this by the way. The world is the world, and artists are
artists; the artist may understand the world, but the world can never
understand the artist.

I was happy, life passed like a golden dream till I was twenty-two,
and my father was satisfied that I was an "industrious" student.

From twenty-two till now, when I was twenty-eight, life had opened out
into fuller colour still. My art remained the life of the soul, of all
that was best in me, but the brain and the senses had come forward,
demanding their share of recognition, too, and out of the many
coloured strands of which we can weave our web of life, I had chosen
that which gleams the next brightest to art, the strand of passion,
and woven much with that.

I had travelled, passing from country to country, city to city,
finding love and inspiration everywhere, for the world is full of both
for those who desire and look for them, and now I had come on this
coasting trip along the shores of Alaska in the same spirit, looki