insisted on seeing Beilstein in person and told him the facts. Beilstein
treated the visitor as an impostor and showed him the door, taking his
address, however, and scornfully bidding him make good his story by
painting a similar picture, unsigned. For this, if it was worth anything,
the dealer promised he should be liberally paid. Naturally Campbell
Corot's professional dander was up, and he produced in a week a Corotish
'Dance of Nymphs,' if anything, more specious than the last. For this
Beilstein gave him twenty-five dollars, and within a month you might have
seen it under the skylight of a country museum, where it is still
reverently explained to successive generations of school-children.

"If Campbell Corot had been a stronger character, he might have made
some stand against the fraudulent success his second manner was
achieving. But, unhappily, in those experimental years he had acquired
an experimental knowledge of the whisky of Cedar Street. His irregular
and spend-thrift ways had put him out of all lines of employment.
Besides, he was consumed by an artist's desire to create a kind of
picture that he could not hope to sell as his own. Nor did the voice of
the tempter, Beilstein, fail to make itself heard. He offered an
unfailing market for the little canvases at twenty-five and fifty
dollars, according to size. There was a patron to supply unlimited
colours and stretchers, a pocket that never refused to advance a small
bill when thirst or lesser need found Campbell Corot penniless. Almost
inevitably he passed from occasional to habitual forgery, consoling
himself with the thought that he never signed the pictures and, before
the law at least, was blameless. But signed they all were somewhere
between their furtive entrance at Beilstein's basement and their
appearance on his walls or in the auction rooms. Of course it wasn't the
blackguard Beilstein who forged the five magic letters; he would never
take the risk, 'Blast his dirty soul!' cried Campbell Corot aloud, as he