and had made some success in the world, I was in the garden of a house
which adjoined Mr. Watt's new Little Holland House, and he, in his
garden, saw me through the hedge. It was then that I received from him
the first letter that I had had for years. In this letter he told me
that he had watched my success with eager interest, and asked me to
shake hands with him in spirit. "What success I may have," he wrote,
"will be very incomplete and unsatisfactory if you cannot do what I have
long been hesitating to ask. If you cannot, keep silence. If you can,
one word, 'Yes,' will be enough."

I answered simply, "Yes."

After that he wrote to me again, and for two or three years we
corresponded, but I never came into personal contact with him.

As the past is now to me like a story in a book that I once read, I can
speak of it easily. But if by doing so I thought that I might give pain
or embarrassment to any one else, I should be silent about this
long-forgotten time. After careful consideration it does not seem to me
that it can be either indiscreet or injurious to let it be known that
this great artist honored and appreciated my efforts and strife in my
art; that this great man could not rid himself of the pain of feeling
that he "had spoiled my life" (a chivalrous assumption of blame for what
was, I think, a natural, almost inevitable, catastrophe), and that long
after all personal relation had been broken off, he wrote to me gently,
kindly,--as sympathetically ignoring the strangeness of the position, as
if, to use his own expression, "we stood face to face on the brink of an
universal grave."

When this tender kindness was established between us, he sent me a