moment with, 'Painter feller, you knowed the pesky ways of paint, didn't
yer?' but when I followed up this promising lead and claimed him as an
associate, he repulsed me with, 'Stuck up, ain't yer? Parley French like
your friend? S'pose you've showed in the Saloon at Paris.' Giving it up,
I replied simply: 'I have; I'm a landscape painter, too, but I'd like to
say before I go that I should be glad to be able to paint a picture like
that.' Looking me in the eye and seeing I meant it, 'Shake!' he replied
cordially. As we shook, his breath met me fair: it was such a breath as
was not uncommon in old-time Cedar Street. Gentlemen who affect this
aroma are, I have noticed, seldom indifferent to one sort of invitation,
so I ventured hardily: 'You know Nickerson's Glengyle, sir; perhaps you
will do me the favour to drink a glass with me while we chat.' Here I
could tell you a lot about Nickerson's." "Don't," begged the Critic, who
is abstemious. "I will only say, then, that Nickerson's, once an
all-night refuge, closes now at three--desecration has made it the yellow
marble office of a teetotaler in the banking line--and the Glengyle, that
blessed essence of the barley, heather, peat, and mist of Old Scotland,
has been taken over by an exporting company, limited. Sometimes I think I
detect a little of it in the poisons that the grocers of Glasgow and
Edinburgh send over here, or perhaps I only dream of the old taste. Then
it was itself, and by the second glass Campbell Corot was quite ready to
soliloquise. You shall have his story about as he told it, but abridged a
little in view of your tender ages and the hour.

* * * * *

"John Campbell had grown up contentedly on the old farm under Mount
Everett until one summer when a landscape painter took board with the
family. At first the lad despised the gentle art as unmanly, but as he
watched the mysterious processes he longed to try his hand. The