Project Gutenberg's The Man In The High-Water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith

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Title: The Man In The High-Water Boots
1909

Author: F. Hopkinson Smith

Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23701]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS

By F. Hopkinson Smith

1909

Now and then in my various prowlings I have met a man with
a personality; one with mental equipment, heart endowment,
self-forgetfulness, and charm--the kind of charm that makes you glad
when he comes and sorry when he goes.

One was a big-chested, straight-backed, clear-eyed, clean-souled
sea-dog, with arms of hickory, fingers of steel, and a brain in instant
touch with a button marked "Experience and Pluck." Another was a
devil-may-care, barefooted Venetian, who wore a Leporello hat canted
over one eye and a scarlet sash about his thin, shapely waist, and whose
corn teeth gleamed and flashed as he twisted his mustache or threw
kisses to the pretty bead-stringers crossing Ponte Lungo. Still a third
was a little sawed-off, freckled-faced, red-headed Irishman, who drove a
cab through London fogs in winter, poled my punt among the lily-pads in
summer, and hung wall-paper between times.

These I knew and _loved_; even now the cockles of my heart warm up when
I think of them. Others I knew and _liked_; the difference being simply
one of personality.

This time it is a painter who crosses my path--a mere lad of thirty two
or three, all boy-heart, head, and brush. I had caught a glimpse of him
in New York, when he "blew in" (no other phrase expresses his movement)
where his pictures were being hung, and again in Philadelphia when some
crushed ice and a mixture made it pleasant for everybody, but I had
never examined all four sides of him until last summer.

We were at Dives at the time, lunching in the open courtyard of the inn,
three of us, when the talk drifted toward the young painter, his life at
his old mill near Eure and his successes at the Salon and elsewhere.
Our host, the Sculptor, had come down in his automobile--a lo