lery, hung in our house for years. His dearest friend was a pretty
model who was, when my memory begins, working for some position in a
board-school. I can remember her sitting at the side of the throne in the
North End Studio, a book in her hand and my father hearing her say a Latin
lesson. Her face was the typical mild, oval face of the painting of that
time, and may indeed have helped in the moulding of an ideal of beauty. I
found it the other day drawn in pencil on a blank leaf of a volume of the
"Earthly Paradise." It was at Bedford Park that I had heard Farrar, whom I
had first known at Burnham Beeches, tell of Potter's death and burial.
Potter had been very poor and had died from the effects of
semi-starvation. He had lived so long on bread and tea that his stomach
withered--I am sure that was the word used, and when his relations found
out and gave him good food, it was too late. Farrar had been at the
funeral and had stood behind some well-to-do people who were close about
the grave and saw one point to the model, who had followed the hearse on
foot and was now crying at a distance, and say, "that is the woman who had
all his money." She had often begged him to allow her to pay his debts,
but he would not have it. Probably his rich friends blamed his poor
friends, and they the rich, and I daresay, nobody had known enough to help
him. Besides, he had a strange form of dissipation, I had heard someone
say; he was devoted to children, and would become interested in some
child--his "Dormouse" is a portrait of a child--and spend his money on its
education. My sister remembers seeing him paint with a dark glove on his
right hand, and his saying that he had used so much varnish the reflection
of the hand would have teased him but for the glove. "I will soon have to
paint my face some dark colour," he added. I have no memory, however, but
of noticing that he sat at the easel, whereas my father always stands and
walks up and down, and that there was dark blue, a colour that always
affects me, in the background of his picture. There is a public gallery of
Wilson's work in his native Aberdeen and my sisters have a number of his
landscapes--wood-scenes for the most part--painted with phlegm and
melancholy, the romantic movement drawing to its latest phase.

IX

My father read out to me, for the first time, when I was eight or nine
years old. Between Sligo and Rosses Point, there is a tongue of land
covered with coarse gr