going to live three months, and when he dies his pictures
can't be had for love or money."

'I took care to spread that little fact as far as I could, and prepare
the world for the event.

'I take credit to myself for our plan of selling the pictures--it was
mine. I suggested it that last evening when we were laying out our
campaign, and all three of us agreed to give it a good fair trial before
giving it up for some other. It succeeded with all of us. I walked only
two days, Claude walked two--both of afraid to make Millet celebrated
too close to home--but Carl walked only half a day, the bright,
conscienceless rascal, and after that he travelled like a duke.

'Every now and then we got in with a country editor and started an item
around through the press; not an item announcing that a new painter had
been discovered, but an item which let on that everybody knew Francois
Millet; not an item praising him in any way, but merely a word
concerning the present condition of the "master"--sometimes hopeful,
sometimes despondent, but always tinged with fears for the worst. We
always marked these paragraphs, and sent the papers to all the people
who had bought pictures of us.

'Carl was soon in Paris and he worked things with a high hand. He made
friends with the correspondents, and got Millet's condition reported to
England and all over the continent, and America, and everywhere.

'At the end of six weeks from the start, we three met in Paris and
called a halt, and stopped sending back to Millet for additional
pictures. The boom was so high, and everything so ripe, that we saw that
it would be a mistake not to strike now, right away, without waiting any
longer. So we wrote Millet to go to bed and begin to waste away pretty
fast, for we should like him to die in ten days if he could get ready.

'Then we figured up and found that among us we had sold eighty-five
small pictures and studies, and had sixty-nine thousand francs to show
for it. Carl had made the last sale and the most brilliant one of all.
He sold the "Angelus" for twenty-two hundred francs. How we did glorify
him!--not foreseeing that a day was coming by-and-by when France would
struggle to own it and a stranger would capture it for five hundred and
fifty thousand, cash.

'We had a wind-up champagne supper that night, and next day Claude and
I packed up and went off to nurse Millet through his last days and keep
busybodies out of the house and send daily bul