to a warmer climate." Ill, and without means,
beyond the few pounds he could gather from his hasty breaking-up, he had
courage to look on the cheerful side of things, and went off in the first
vessel to the West Indies. I saw him afterwards. He gave me a history of
his adventures. He went from island to island--became portrait-painter--a
painter of scenes--of any thing that might offer; by good conduct,
urbanity, gentleness, and industry, was respected, liked, and patronized;
lived, and sent home a thousand pounds or two--came to England to see his
friends for a few months. I saw him on his way to them. He was then in
health and spirits--told me the many events of the few years--and in six
weeks the climate killed him. But the anecdote of his turning
portrait-painter is what I have to tell. On the passage, they touched at
one of the islands, and he found but very little money in his pocket; and,
while others went off to hotels, or estates of friends, he went his way
quietly to seek out cheap lodgings. He found such, which the good woman
told him he could have in three hours. He afterwards learned that she
waited that time for the then tenant _to die in the bed which he was to
occupy_. Walking away to pass the time, he met some of his fellow
passengers, who asked him if he had been to see the governor. He had not.
They told him it was necessary he should go. So thither he went. Now, the
governor asked him, "What brought him out to the West Indies?" He replied,
that he came as an artist. "An artist!" said the governor. "That is a
novelty indeed. Have you any specimens? I should like to see them." Now,
among his things, he had a miniature of himself, painted by a man who
attained eminence in the profession, and whom I knew well. Here, with an
ingenuousness characteristic of the man, he acknowledged to me how,
starvation staring him in the face, _he_ stared in the governor's; and the
governor being rather a hard-featured man, whose likeness, though he had
never taken a portrait, he thought he could hit; when the governor admired
the miniature, and asked him, "If it was his?" he did not resist the
temptation, and said, "Yes." Upon which the governor sat to him. Then
others sat to him; and so he left the island, with a replenished purse,
and from that time became a portrait-painter. If the poor fellow had been
the veriest dauber, you, Eusebius, would have sat to him twenty times over,
and have told all the country round quite a