sent intention of permitting me to survive her. She was, at that
very moment, meritoriously and heartily engaged in eating her breakfast.
My prospects being now of the best possible kind, I felt encouraged to
write once more to my father, telling him of my fresh start in life, and
proposing a renewal of our acquaintance. I regret to say that he was so
rude as not to answer my letter.

Mr. Batterbury was punctual to the moment. He gave a gasp of relief when
he beheld me, full of life, with my palette on my thumb, gazing fondly
on my new canvas.

"That's right!" he said. "I like to see you with your mind composed.
Annabella would have come with me; but she has a little headache this
morning. She sends her love and best wishes."

I seized my chalks and began with that confidence in myself which has
never forsaken me in any emergency. Being perfectly well aware of
the absolute dependence of the art of portrait-painting on the art
of flattery, I determined to start with making the mere outline of my
likeness a compliment to my sitter.

It was much easier to resolve on doing this than really to do it. In
the first place, my hand would relapse into its wicked old caricaturing
habits. In the second place, my brother-in-law's face was so
inveterately and completely ugly as to set every artifice of pictorial
improvement at flat defiance. When a man has a nose an inch long, with
the nostrils set perpendicularly, it is impossible to flatter it--you
must either change it into a fancy nose, or resignedly acquiesce in
it. When a man has no perceptible eyelids, and when his eyes globularly
project so far out of his head, that you expect to have to pick them up
for him whenever you see him lean forward, how are mortal fingers and
bushes to diffuse the right complimentary expression over them? You must
either do them the most hideous and complete justice, or give them up
altogether. The late Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., was undoubtedly the
most artful and uncompromising flatterer that ever smoothed out all the
natural characteristic blemishes from a sitter's face; but even that
accomplished parasite would have found Mr. Batterbury too much for him,
and would have been driven, for the first time in his practice of art,
to the uncustomary and uncourtly resource of absolutely painting a
genuine likeness.

As for me, I put my trust in Lady Malkinshaw's power of living, and
portrayed the face of Mr. Batterbury in all its native horror. A