sitions of
his great exemplar. He signed the canvas Campbell Corot, in the familiar
capital letters, because he didn't want to take all the credit; because
he desired to mark emphatically the change in his manner, and because it
struck him as a good painting name justified by the resemblance between
his surname and the master's Christian name. It was a heartfelt homage in
intention. If the disciple had been familiar with Renaissance usages, he
would undoubtedly have signed himself John of Camille.

"'Sunrise in Berkshire' fetched sixty dollars in a downtown auction room,
the highest price John had ever received; but this was only the beginning
of a bewildering rise in values. When John next saw the picture, Campbell
had been deftly removed, and the landscape, being favourably noticed in
the press, brought seven hundred dollars in an uptown salesroom. John
happened on it again in Beilstein's gallery, where the price had risen to
thirteen hundred dollars--a tidy sum for a small Corot in those early
days. At that figure it fell to a noted collector whose walls it still
adorns. Here Campbell Corot's New England conscience asserted itself. He
insisted on seeing Beilstein in person and told him the facts. Beilstein
treated the visitor as an impostor and showed him the door, taking his
address, however, and scornfully bidding him make good his story by
painting a similar picture, unsigned. For this, if it was worth anything,
the dealer promised he should be liberally paid. Naturally Campbell
Corot's professional dander was up, and he produced in a week a Corotish
'Dance of Nymphs,' if anything, more specious than the last. For this
Beilstein gave him twenty-five dollars, and within a month you might have
seen it under the skylight of a country museum, where it is still
reverently explained to successive generations of school-children.

"If Campbell Corot had been a stronger character, he might have made
some stand against the fraudulent success his second manner was
achieving. But, unhappily, in those experimental years he had acquired
an experimental knowledge of the whisky of Cedar Street. His irregular
and spend-thrift ways had put him out of all lines of employment.
Besides, he was consumed by an artist's desire to create a kind of
picture that he could not hope to sell as his own. Nor did the voice of
the tempter, Beilstein, fail to make itself heard. He offered an
unfailing market for the little canvases at twenty-five a