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+Project Gutenberg's The Man In The High-Water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Man In The High-Water Boots
+       1909
+
+Author: F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23701]
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
+
+
+
+
+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 long, low,
+double-jointed crouching tiger--a forty-devil-power machine, fearing
+neither God nor man, and which is bound sooner or later to come to an
+untimely end and the scrap heap.
+
+All about, fringing the tea tables and filling the summer air with their
+chatter and laughter, were gathered not only the cream, but the very
+top skimmings of all the fashion and folly of Trouville--twenty minutes
+away, automobile time--their blossoming hats, full-blown parasols,
+and pink and white veils adding another flower-bed to the quaint old
+courtyard.
+
+With the return of the Man from the Latin Quarter, his other guest, who
+knew the ins and outs of the cellar, and who had gone in search of a
+certain vintage known only to the initiated (don't forget to ask for it
+when you go--it has no label, but the cork is sealed with yellow wax; M.
+Ramois, the good landlord, will know the kind--_if he thinks you do_),
+our host, the Sculptor, his mind still on his friend the painter, looked
+up and said, as he reached for the corkscrew:
+
+“Why not go to-morrow? The mill is the most picturesque thing you
+ever saw--an old Louis XIII house and mill on the River Rille near
+Beaumont-le-Roger, once inhabited by the poet Chateaubriand. The river
+runs underground in the sands for some distance and comes out a few
+miles from Knight's--cold as ice and clear as crystal and packed full of
+trout. Besides Knight is at home--had a line from him this morning.”
+
+The Man from the Quarter laid down his glass.
+
+“How far is it?” This man is so daft on fishing that he has been known
+to kiss the first trout he hooks in the spring.
+
+“Only fifty-six miles, my dear boy--run you over in an hour.”
+
+“And everything else that gets in the way,” said the Man from the
+Quarter, moving his glass nearer the Sculptor's elbow.
+
+“No danger of that--I've got a siren that you can hear for a mile--but
+really, it's only a step.”
+
+*****
+
+I once slid down a salt mine on a pair of summer pantaloons and brought
+up in total darkness (a godsend under the circumstances). I still
+shudder when I think of the speed; of the way my hair tried to leave my
+scalp; of the peculiar blink in my eyes; of the hours it took to
+live through forty seconds; and of my final halt in the middle of a
+moon-faced, round-paunched German who was paid a mark for saving the
+bones and necks of idiots like myself.
+
+This time the sliding was done in an overcoat (although the summer sun
+was blazing), a steamer cap, and a pair of goggles. First there came a
+shivery chuggetty-chug, as if the beast was shaking himself loose. Next
+a noise like the opening of a bolt in an iron cage, and then the Inn
+of William the Conqueror--the village-beach, inlet--wide sea, streamed
+behind like a panorama run at high pressure.
+
+The first swoop was along the sea, a whirl into Houlgate, a mad dash
+through the village, dogs and chickens running for dear life, and
+out again with the deadly rush of a belated wild goose hurrying to a
+southern clime. Our host sat beside the chauffeur, who looked like the
+demon in a ballet in his goggles and skull-cap. The Man from the Quarter
+and I crouched on the rear seats, our eyes on the turn of the road
+ahead. What we had left behind, or what might be on either side of us
+was of no moment; what would come around that far-distant curve a mile
+away and a minute off was what troubled us. The demon and the Sculptor
+were as cool as the captain and first mate on the bridge of a liner in
+a gale; the Man from the Quarter stared doggedly ahead; I was too scared
+for scenery and too proud to ask the Sculptor to slow down, so I thought
+of my sins and slowly murmured, “Now I lay me.”
+
+When we got to the top of the last hill and had swirled into the
+straight broad turnpike leading to Lisieux, the Sculptor spoke in
+an undertone to the demon, did something with his foot or hand or
+teeth--everything with which he could push, pull, or bite was busy--and
+the machine, as if struck by a lash, sprang into space. Trees, fences,
+little farmhouses, hay-stacks, canvas-covered wagons, frightened
+children, dogs, now went by in blurred outlines; ten miles, thirty
+miles, then a string of villages, Liseau among them, the siren shrieking
+like a lost soul sinking into perdition.
+
+“Watch the road to the right,” wheezed the Sculptor between his breaths;
+“that is where the Egyptian prince was killed--” this over his shoulder
+to me--“a tram-car hit him--you can see the hole in the bank. Made that
+last mile in sixty-five seconds--running fifty-nine now--look out
+for that cross-road--'Wow-wow-oo--wow-wow'” (siren). “Damn that
+market cart--'Wow-wow-o-o-wow.'” “Slow up, or we'll be on top of that
+donkey--just grazed it. Can't tell what a donkey will do when a girl's
+driving it.” 'Wow-oo-w-o--.'
+
+Up a long hill now, down into a valley--the road like a piece of white
+tape stretching ahead--past school-houses, barns, market gardens; into
+dense woods, out on to level plains bare of a tree--one mad, devilish,
+brutal rush, with every man's eyes glued to the turn of the road ahead,
+which every half minute swerved, straightened, swerved again; now
+blocked by trees, now opening out, only to close, twist, and squirm
+anew. Great fun this, gambling with death, knowing that from behind any
+bush, beyond every hill crest, and around each curve there may spring
+something that will make assorted junk of your machine and send you to
+Ballyhack!
+
+“Only one more hill,” breathed the Sculptor, wiping the caked dust from
+his lips. Woo-oo-wow-o-o (nurse with a baby-carriage this time, running
+into the bushes like a frightened rabbit). “See the mill stream--that's
+it flashing in the sunlight! See the roof of the mill? That's Aston
+Knight's! Down brakes! All out--fifty-six miles in one hour and
+twenty-two minutes! Not bad!”
+
+I sprang out--so did the Man from the Quarter--the flash from the mill
+stream glistening in the sunlight had set his blood to tingling; as for
+myself, no sheltering doorway had ever looked so inviting.
+
+“Marie! _Marie!_ Where's monsieur?” cried out the Sculptor from his seat
+beside the demon.
+
+“Up-stairs, I think,” answered a stout, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked woman,
+wiping her hand and arms on her apron as she spoke. She had started on a
+run from the brook's edge behind the house, where she had been washing,
+when she heard the shriek of the siren, but the machine had pulled up
+before she could reach the door-step.
+
+“He went out early, but I think he's back now. Come in, come in, all of
+you. I'm glad to see you--so will he be.”
+
+Marie was cook, housemaid, valet, mother, doctor, and any number of
+things beside to Knight; just as in the village across the stream where
+she lived--or rather slept o' nights--she was billposter, bell-ringer,
+and town crier, to say nothing of her being the mother of eleven
+children, all her own--Knight being the adopted twelfth.
+
+“The mill might as well be without water as without Marie,” said the
+Sculptor. “Wait until you taste her baked trout--the chef at the Voisin
+is a fool beside her.” We had all shaken the dear woman's hand how
+and had preceded her into the square hall filled with easels, fresh
+canvases, paintings hung on hooks to dry, pots of brushes, rain coats,
+sample racks of hats, and the like.
+
+All this time the beast outside was snorting like a race-horse catching
+its breath after a run, the demon walking in front of it, examining its
+teeth, or mouth, or eyes, or whatever you do examine when you go poking
+around in front of it.
+
+Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom--evidently
+Knight's--full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels
+lining the walls; and then into another--evidently the guest's room--all
+lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old
+portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn,
+grumbling, “Just like him to try and fool us,” but no trace of Knight.
+
+Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus
+bringing clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of
+willows shading the rushing stream below.
+
+“Louis! _Louis!_ Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?”
+
+There came an halloo--faint--downstream.
+
+“The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get
+him out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!”
+
+There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an
+uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself
+barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a
+crowded bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta,
+where I used the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when
+years ago, I clung to the platform of an elevated station in an effort
+to get, between the legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines
+of the spider-web connecting the two cities. I have watched, too,
+other painters in equally uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door
+painters; not steam-heated, easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda
+or photos to copy from) but it was the first time in all my varied
+experiences that I had ever come upon a painter standing up to his
+armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other kind of stream, the water
+breaking against his body as a rock breasts a torrent, and he working
+away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder high enough to scale
+the mill's roof.
+
+“Any fish?” yelled the Man from the Quarter.
+
+“Yes, one squirming around my knees now--shipped him a minute ago--foot
+slipped. Awful glad to see you--stay where you are till I get this high
+light.”
+
+“Stay where I am!” bellowed the Sculptor. “Do you think I'm St. Peter or
+some long-legged crane that--”
+
+“All right--I'm coming.”
+
+He had grabbed both sides of the ladder by this time, and with head in
+the _crotch_ was sloshing ashore, the water squirting from the tops of
+his boots.
+
+“Shake! Mighty good of you fellows to come all the way down to see me.
+Here, you stone-cutter--help me off with these boots. Marie's getting
+luncheon. Don't touch that canvas--all this morning's work--got to work
+early.” (It looked to be a finished picture to me.)
+
+He was flat on the grass now, his legs in the air like an acrobat about
+to balance a globe, the water pouring from his wading boots, soaking the
+rest of him, all three of us tugging away--I at his head, the Sculptor
+at his feet. How Marie ever helped him squirm out of this diving-suit
+was more than I could tell.
+
+We had started for the mill now, the Man from the Quarter lugging the
+boots, still hoping there might be some truth in the trout story, the
+Sculptor with the palette (big as a tea-tray), Knight with the ladder,
+and I with the wet canvas.
+
+Again the cry rang out: “Marie! _Marie!_” and again the old woman
+started on a run--for the kitchen this time (she had been listening
+for this halloo--he generally came in wringing wet)--reappearing as we
+reached the hall door, her apron full of clothes swept from a drying
+line stretched before the big, all-embracing fireplace. These she
+carried ahead of us upstairs and deposited on the small iron bedstead
+in the painter's own room, Knight close behind, his wet socks making
+Man-Friday footprints in the middle of each well-scrubbed step. Once
+there, Knight dodged into a closet, wriggled himself loose, and was out
+again with half of Marie's apronful covering his chest and legs.
+
+It was easy to see where the power of his brush lay. No timid,
+uncertain, niggling stroke ever came from that torso or forearm or
+thigh. He hewed with a broad axe, not with a chisel, and he hewed
+true--that was the joy of it. The men of Meissonier's time, like the old
+Dutchmen, worked from their knuckle joints. These new painters, in their
+new technique--new to some--old really, as that of Velasquez and Frans
+Hals--swing their brushes from their spinal columns down their forearms
+(Knight's biceps measure seventeen inches) and out through their
+finger-tips, with something of the rhythm and force of an old-time
+blacksmith welding a tire. Broad chests, big boilers, strong arms,
+straight legs, and stiff backbones have much to do with success in
+life--more than we give them credit for. Instead of measuring men's
+heads, it would be just as well, once in a while, to slip the tape
+around their chests and waists. Steam is what makes the wheels go
+round, and steam is well-digested fuel and a place to put it. With
+this equipment a man can put “GO” into his business, strength into
+his literature, virility into his brush; without it he may succeed in
+selling spool cotton or bobbins, may write pink poems for the multitude
+and cover wooden panels with cardinals and ladies of high degree; in
+real satin and life-like lace, but no part of his output will take a
+full man's breath away.
+
+*****
+
+Sunshine, flowers, open windows letting in the cool breezes from meadow
+and stream; an old beamed ceiling, smoke-browned by countless pipes;
+walls covered with sketches of every nook and corner about us; a table
+for four, heaped with melons, grapes, cheese, and flanked by ten-pin
+bottles just out of the brook; good-fellowship, harmony of ideas,
+courage of convictions--with no heads swelled to an unnatural size; four
+appetites--enormous, prodigious appetites; Knight for host and Marie as
+high chamberlainess, make the feast of Lucullus and the afternoon teas
+of Cleopatra but so many quick lunches served in the rush hour of a
+downtown restaurant! Not only were the trout-baked-in cream (Marie's
+specialty) all that the Sculptor had claimed for them, but the
+fried chicken, soufflés--everything, in fact, that the dear woman
+served--would have gained a Blue Ribbon had she filled the plate of any
+committeeman making the award.
+
+With the coffee and cigars (cigarettes had been smoked with every
+course--it was that kind of a feast) the four mouths had a breathing
+spell.
+
+Up to this time the talk had been a staccato performance between
+mouthfuls:
+
+“Yes--came near smashing a donkey--don't care if I do--no--no gravy”
+ (Sculptor). “Let me put an extra bubble in your glass” (Knight). “These
+fish are as firm as the Adirondack trout” (Man from the Quarter). “More
+cream--thank you. Marie!” (Knight, of course) “more butter.” “Donkey
+wasn't the only thing we missed--grazed a baby carriage and--” (Scribe).
+“I'm going to try a red ibis after luncheon and a miller for a tail
+fly--pass the melon” (Man from the Quarter): That sort of hurried talk
+without logical beginning or ending.
+
+But now each man had a comfortable chair, and filled it with shoulders
+hidden deep in its capacious depths, and legs straight out, only the
+arms and hands free enough to be within reach of the match-safe and
+thimble glasses. And with the ease and comfort of it all the talk itself
+slowed down to a pace more in harmony with that peace which passeth all
+understanding--unless you've a seat at the table.
+
+The several masters of the outdoor school were now called up, their
+merits discussed and their failings hammered: Thaulow, Sorolla y
+Bastida, the new Spanish wonder, whose exhibition the month before
+had astonished and delighted Paris: the Glasgow school; Zorn, Sargent,
+Winslow Homer--all the men of the direct, forceful school, men who
+swing their brushes from their spines instead of their finger-tips--were
+slashed into and made mincemeat of or extolled to the skies. Then
+the “patty-pats,” with their little dabs of yellow, blue, and red,
+in imitation of the master Monet; the “slick and slimies,” and the
+“woollies”--the men who essayed the vague, mysterious, and obscure--were
+set up and knocked down one after the other, as is the custom with all
+groups of painters the world over when the never-ending question of
+technique is tossed into the middle of the arena.
+
+Outdoor work next came into review and the discomforts and hardships
+a painter must go through to get what he is after, the Man from the
+Quarter defending the sit-by-the-fire fellows.
+
+“No use making a submarine diver of yourself, Knight,” he growled.
+“Go and look at it and then come home and paint the impression and put
+something of yourself into it.”
+
+Knight threw his head back and laughed. “I'd rather put the brook
+in--all of it.”
+
+“But I don't see why you've got to get soaked to the skin every time you
+want to make a sketch.”
+
+“The soaking is what helps,” replied Knight, reaching for a match. “I
+like to feel I'm drink-some of it in. Then, when you're right in the
+middle of it you don't put on any airs and try to improve on what's
+before you and spoil it with detail. One dimple on a girl's cheek is
+charming; two--and you send for the doctor. And she's so simple when you
+look into her face--I'm talking of the brook now, not the girl--and it's
+so easy to put her down as she is, not the form and color only, but the
+_mood_ in which you find her. A brook is worse, really, than your best
+girl in the lightning changes she can go through--laughing, crying,
+coquetting--just as the mood seizes her. There, for instance,
+hanging over your head is a 'gray day”'--and he pointed to one of his
+running-water sketches tacked to the wall. “I tried to cheer her up a
+little with touches of warm tones here and there--all lies--same kind
+you tell your own chickabiddy when she's blue--but she wouldn't have it
+and cried straight ahead for four hours until the sun came out; but I
+was through by that time and waded ashore. You can see for yourselves
+how unhappy she was.” He spoke as if the sketch was alive--and it was.
+
+“But I always work out of doors that way,” he continued. “In winter up
+in Holland I sit in furs and wooden shoes, and often have to put alcohol
+in my water-cups to keep my colors from freezing. My big picture of 'The
+Torrent'--the one in the Toledo Art Gallery--was painted in January, and
+out of doors. As for the brushwork, I try to do the best I can. I used
+to tickle up things I painted; some of the fellows at Julian's believed
+in that, and so did Fleury and Lefebvre to some extent.”
+
+“And when did you get over it?” I asked.
+
+“When my father persuaded me to send a bold sketch to the Volney Club,
+which I had done to please myself, and which they hung and bought. So I
+said to myself: 'Why trim, clean up, and make pretty a picture, when by
+simply painting what I love in nature in a free, breezy manner while my
+enthusiasm lasts--and it generally lasts until I get through;--sometimes
+it spills over to the next day--I please myself and a lot of people
+beside.”
+
+We were all on our feet now examining the sketches--all running-brook
+studies--most of them made in that same pair of high-water boots. No one
+but the late Fritz Thaulow approaches him in giving the reality of this
+most difficult subject for an outdoor painter. The ocean surf repeats
+itself in its recurl and swash and by close watching a painter has often
+a chance to use his “second barrel,” so to speak, but the upturned
+face of an unruly brook-is not only million-tinted and endless in its
+expression, but so sensitive in its reflections that every passing cloud
+and patch of blue above it saddens or cheers it.
+
+“Yes, painting water is enough to drive you mad,” burst out Knight, “but
+I don't intend to paint anything else--not for years, any way. Hired the
+mill so I could paint the water running _away_ from you downhill. That's
+going to take a good many years to get hold of, but I'm going to stick
+it out. I can't always paint it from the banks, not if I want to study
+the middle ripples at my feet, and these are the ones that run out of
+your canvas just above your name-plate. _Got_ to stand in it, I tell
+you. Then you get the drawing, and the drawing is what counts. Oh, I
+love it!” Knight stretched his big arms and legs and sprang from his
+chair.
+
+“Really, fellows, I don't know anything about it. All I do is to let
+myself go. I always _feel_ more than I _see_, and so my brush has a
+devil of a job to keep up. Marie! _Marie!_”
+
+Had the good woman been a mile down the brook she could have heard
+him--she was only in the next room. “Bring in the boots--two pairs this
+time--we're going fishing. And, Marie--has the chauffeur had anything to
+eat?”
+
+“Yes, monsieur.”
+
+“Anything to drink?”
+
+“No, monsieur.”
+
+“_What!_ Hand him this,” and he grabbed a half-empty bottle from the
+table.
+
+I sprang forward and caught it before Marie got her fingers around it.
+
+“Not if I know it!” I cried. “We've got to get back to Dives. When he
+lands me inside my garden at the inn he shall have a magnum, but not a
+drop till he does.”
+
+*****
+
+When the two had gone the Sculptor and I leaned back in our chairs and
+lighted fresh cigars. My enthusiasm has not cooled for the sports of
+my youth. With a comfortable stool, a well-filled basket, and a long
+jointed rod, I, like many another staid old painter, can still get
+an amazing amount of enjoyment watching a floating cork, but I
+didn't propose to follow those two lunatics. I knew the Man from the
+Quarter--had known him from the day of his birth--and knew what he would
+do and where he would go (over his head sometimes) for a poor devil of a
+fish half as long as his finger, and I had had positive evidence of
+what the other web-footed duck thought of ice-cold water. No, I'd take a
+little sugar in mine, if you please, and put a drop of--but the Sculptor
+had already foreseen and was then forestalling my needs, so we leaned
+back in our chairs once more.
+
+Again the talk covered wide reaches.
+
+“Great boy, Knight,” broke out the Sculptor in a sudden burst of
+enthusiasm over his friend. “You ought to see him handle a crowd when
+he's at work. He knows the French people--never gets mad. He bought a
+calf for Marie last week, and drove it home himself. Told me it had ten
+legs, four heads, and twenty tails before he got it here. Old woman lost
+hers and Knight bought her another--he'd bring her a herd if she wanted
+it. All the way from the market the boys kept up a running fire of
+criticism. When the ringleader came too near, Knight sprang at him with
+a yelp like a dog's. The boy was so taken aback that he ran. Then
+Knight roared with laughter, and in an instant the whole crowd were his
+friends--two of them helped him get the calf out of town. When a French
+crowd laughs with you you can do anything with them. He had had more fun
+bringing home that calf, he told me, than he'd had for weeks, and he's a
+wonder at having a good time.”
+
+Then followed--much of which was news to me--an account of the painter's
+earlier life and successes.
+
+He was born in Paris, August 3, 1873; his father, Ridgway Knight, the
+distinguished painter, and his mother, who was Rebecca Morris Webster,
+both being Philadelphians. Not only is he, therefore, of true American
+descent, but his eight great-grandparents were Americans, dating back
+to Thomas Ridgway, who was born in Delaware in 1713. Thus by both the
+French and American laws he is an American citizen.
+
+At fourteen he was sent to Chigwell School in England by his father,
+to have “art knocked out of him” by the uncongenial surroundings of the
+quiet old school where the great William Penn had been taught to read
+and write. He left in 1890, having won the Special Classical Prize,
+Oxford and Cambridge certificate Prize, besides prizes for carpentering,
+gymnasium, running, and “putting the weight.”
+
+At home the boy always drew and painted for pleasure, as well as at
+school during the half-holidays. Some water-colors made during a holiday
+trip in Brittany in 1890 decided his father to allow him to follow art
+as a career. He entered Julian's studio, with Jules Lefebvre and Tony
+Robert-Fleury as professors in 1891, and studied from the nude during
+the five following winters. His principal work was, however, done in the
+country at and around Poissy, under the guidance of his father.
+
+His exhibits in the Paris Salon (_artistes Français_) were twenty-four
+oils and water-colors from 1894 to 1906, obtaining an honorable mention
+in 1901 with the “Thames at Whitchurch”; a gold medal, third class, in
+1905, with “The Torrent”; and a gold medal, second class, in 1906, with
+his triptych “The Giant Cities” (New York, Paris, London), which makes
+him _hors concours_, with the great distinction of being the first
+American landscape painter to get two Salon gold medals in two
+consecutive years. He won also a bronze medal in the American section
+of the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 with a water-color, and a gold
+medal of honor at Rheims, Cherbourg, Geneva, and Nantes.
+
+His most important pictures are: “The Torrent,” 4 1/2 x 6 feet, owned by
+the Toledo Art Gallery; “The Abandoned Mill,” 4 1/2 x 6 feet; “The
+End of the Island,” 6 x 8 feet; “Clisson Castle,” 3 x 4 1/2 feet, a
+water-color; “After the Storm,” 3 x 5 feet; and “Winter in Holland,” 3x4
+feet.
+
+I had listened to the Sculptor's brief account of his friend's progress
+with calm attention, but it had not altered my opinion of the man or
+his genius. None of it really interested me except that somebody beside
+myself had found out the lad's qualities--for to me he is still a lad.
+None of the jury who made the awards ever looked below the paint--that
+is, if they were like other juries the world over. They saw the
+brush-mark, no doubt, but they missed the breeze that came with it--was
+its life, really--a breeze that swept through and out of him, blowing
+side by side with genius and good health--a wind of destiny, perhaps,
+that will carry him to climes that other men know not of.
+
+But what a refreshing thing, this breeze, to come out of a man, and what
+a refreshing kind of a man for it to come out of! No pose, no effort
+to fill a No. 8 hat with a No. 7 head; just a simple, conscientious,
+hard-working young painter, humble-minded in the presence of his
+goddess, and full to overflowing with an uncontrollable spontaneity.
+This in itself was worth risking one's neck to see.
+
+Again the cry rang out, “Marie!” and two half-drowned water-rats stepped
+in; the Man from the Quarter in his underpinning--his pair of boots
+leaked and he had stripped them off--and Knight with his own half
+full of water. Both roared with laughter at Marie tugging at the huge
+white-rubber boots, the floor she had scrubbed so conscientiously
+spattered with sand and water.
+
+Then began the customary recriminations: “Hadn't been for you I wouldn't
+have lost him!” “What had I to do with it?” etc., etc.--the same old
+story when neither gets a bite.
+
+That night, bumping over the thank-you-marms, flashing through darkened
+villages, and scooting in a dead heat along ribboned roads ghostly
+white in the starlight, on the way back to my garden--and we did arrive
+safely, and the chauffeur had his magnum (that is, his share of it)--I
+could not help saying to myself:
+
+“Yes, it's good to be young and bouyant, but it's better to be one's
+self.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man In The High-Water Boots, by
+F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
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+Project Gutenberg's The Man In The High-Water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+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: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
+
+
+
+
+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 long, low,
+double-jointed crouching tiger--a forty-devil-power machine, fearing
+neither God nor man, and which is bound sooner or later to come to an
+untimely end and the scrap heap.
+
+All about, fringing the tea tables and filling the summer air with their
+chatter and laughter, were gathered not only the cream, but the very
+top skimmings of all the fashion and folly of Trouville--twenty minutes
+away, automobile time--their blossoming hats, full-blown parasols,
+and pink and white veils adding another flower-bed to the quaint old
+courtyard.
+
+With the return of the Man from the Latin Quarter, his other guest, who
+knew the ins and outs of the cellar, and who had gone in search of a
+certain vintage known only to the initiated (don't forget to ask for it
+when you go--it has no label, but the cork is sealed with yellow wax; M.
+Ramois, the good landlord, will know the kind--_if he thinks you do_),
+our host, the Sculptor, his mind still on his friend the painter, looked
+up and said, as he reached for the corkscrew:
+
+"Why not go to-morrow? The mill is the most picturesque thing you
+ever saw--an old Louis XIII house and mill on the River Rille near
+Beaumont-le-Roger, once inhabited by the poet Chateaubriand. The river
+runs underground in the sands for some distance and comes out a few
+miles from Knight's--cold as ice and clear as crystal and packed full of
+trout. Besides Knight is at home--had a line from him this morning."
+
+The Man from the Quarter laid down his glass.
+
+"How far is it?" This man is so daft on fishing that he has been known
+to kiss the first trout he hooks in the spring.
+
+"Only fifty-six miles, my dear boy--run you over in an hour."
+
+"And everything else that gets in the way," said the Man from the
+Quarter, moving his glass nearer the Sculptor's elbow.
+
+"No danger of that--I've got a siren that you can hear for a mile--but
+really, it's only a step."
+
+*****
+
+I once slid down a salt mine on a pair of summer pantaloons and brought
+up in total darkness (a godsend under the circumstances). I still
+shudder when I think of the speed; of the way my hair tried to leave my
+scalp; of the peculiar blink in my eyes; of the hours it took to
+live through forty seconds; and of my final halt in the middle of a
+moon-faced, round-paunched German who was paid a mark for saving the
+bones and necks of idiots like myself.
+
+This time the sliding was done in an overcoat (although the summer sun
+was blazing), a steamer cap, and a pair of goggles. First there came a
+shivery chuggetty-chug, as if the beast was shaking himself loose. Next
+a noise like the opening of a bolt in an iron cage, and then the Inn
+of William the Conqueror--the village-beach, inlet--wide sea, streamed
+behind like a panorama run at high pressure.
+
+The first swoop was along the sea, a whirl into Houlgate, a mad dash
+through the village, dogs and chickens running for dear life, and
+out again with the deadly rush of a belated wild goose hurrying to a
+southern clime. Our host sat beside the chauffeur, who looked like the
+demon in a ballet in his goggles and skull-cap. The Man from the Quarter
+and I crouched on the rear seats, our eyes on the turn of the road
+ahead. What we had left behind, or what might be on either side of us
+was of no moment; what would come around that far-distant curve a mile
+away and a minute off was what troubled us. The demon and the Sculptor
+were as cool as the captain and first mate on the bridge of a liner in
+a gale; the Man from the Quarter stared doggedly ahead; I was too scared
+for scenery and too proud to ask the Sculptor to slow down, so I thought
+of my sins and slowly murmured, "Now I lay me."
+
+When we got to the top of the last hill and had swirled into the
+straight broad turnpike leading to Lisieux, the Sculptor spoke in
+an undertone to the demon, did something with his foot or hand or
+teeth--everything with which he could push, pull, or bite was busy--and
+the machine, as if struck by a lash, sprang into space. Trees, fences,
+little farmhouses, hay-stacks, canvas-covered wagons, frightened
+children, dogs, now went by in blurred outlines; ten miles, thirty
+miles, then a string of villages, Liseau among them, the siren shrieking
+like a lost soul sinking into perdition.
+
+"Watch the road to the right," wheezed the Sculptor between his breaths;
+"that is where the Egyptian prince was killed--" this over his shoulder
+to me--"a tram-car hit him--you can see the hole in the bank. Made that
+last mile in sixty-five seconds--running fifty-nine now--look out
+for that cross-road--'Wow-wow-oo--wow-wow'" (siren). "Damn that
+market cart--'Wow-wow-o-o-wow.'" "Slow up, or we'll be on top of that
+donkey--just grazed it. Can't tell what a donkey will do when a girl's
+driving it." 'Wow-oo-w-o--.'
+
+Up a long hill now, down into a valley--the road like a piece of white
+tape stretching ahead--past school-houses, barns, market gardens; into
+dense woods, out on to level plains bare of a tree--one mad, devilish,
+brutal rush, with every man's eyes glued to the turn of the road ahead,
+which every half minute swerved, straightened, swerved again; now
+blocked by trees, now opening out, only to close, twist, and squirm
+anew. Great fun this, gambling with death, knowing that from behind any
+bush, beyond every hill crest, and around each curve there may spring
+something that will make assorted junk of your machine and send you to
+Ballyhack!
+
+"Only one more hill," breathed the Sculptor, wiping the caked dust from
+his lips. Woo-oo-wow-o-o (nurse with a baby-carriage this time, running
+into the bushes like a frightened rabbit). "See the mill stream--that's
+it flashing in the sunlight! See the roof of the mill? That's Aston
+Knight's! Down brakes! All out--fifty-six miles in one hour and
+twenty-two minutes! Not bad!"
+
+I sprang out--so did the Man from the Quarter--the flash from the mill
+stream glistening in the sunlight had set his blood to tingling; as for
+myself, no sheltering doorway had ever looked so inviting.
+
+"Marie! _Marie!_ Where's monsieur?" cried out the Sculptor from his seat
+beside the demon.
+
+"Up-stairs, I think," answered a stout, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked woman,
+wiping her hand and arms on her apron as she spoke. She had started on a
+run from the brook's edge behind the house, where she had been washing,
+when she heard the shriek of the siren, but the machine had pulled up
+before she could reach the door-step.
+
+"He went out early, but I think he's back now. Come in, come in, all of
+you. I'm glad to see you--so will he be."
+
+Marie was cook, housemaid, valet, mother, doctor, and any number of
+things beside to Knight; just as in the village across the stream where
+she lived--or rather slept o' nights--she was billposter, bell-ringer,
+and town crier, to say nothing of her being the mother of eleven
+children, all her own--Knight being the adopted twelfth.
+
+"The mill might as well be without water as without Marie," said the
+Sculptor. "Wait until you taste her baked trout--the chef at the Voisin
+is a fool beside her." We had all shaken the dear woman's hand how
+and had preceded her into the square hall filled with easels, fresh
+canvases, paintings hung on hooks to dry, pots of brushes, rain coats,
+sample racks of hats, and the like.
+
+All this time the beast outside was snorting like a race-horse catching
+its breath after a run, the demon walking in front of it, examining its
+teeth, or mouth, or eyes, or whatever you do examine when you go poking
+around in front of it.
+
+Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom--evidently
+Knight's--full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels
+lining the walls; and then into another--evidently the guest's room--all
+lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old
+portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn,
+grumbling, "Just like him to try and fool us," but no trace of Knight.
+
+Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus
+bringing clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of
+willows shading the rushing stream below.
+
+"Louis! _Louis!_ Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?"
+
+There came an halloo--faint--downstream.
+
+"The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get
+him out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!"
+
+There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an
+uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself
+barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a
+crowded bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta,
+where I used the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when
+years ago, I clung to the platform of an elevated station in an effort
+to get, between the legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines
+of the spider-web connecting the two cities. I have watched, too,
+other painters in equally uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door
+painters; not steam-heated, easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda
+or photos to copy from) but it was the first time in all my varied
+experiences that I had ever come upon a painter standing up to his
+armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other kind of stream, the water
+breaking against his body as a rock breasts a torrent, and he working
+away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder high enough to scale
+the mill's roof.
+
+"Any fish?" yelled the Man from the Quarter.
+
+"Yes, one squirming around my knees now--shipped him a minute ago--foot
+slipped. Awful glad to see you--stay where you are till I get this high
+light."
+
+"Stay where I am!" bellowed the Sculptor. "Do you think I'm St. Peter or
+some long-legged crane that--"
+
+"All right--I'm coming."
+
+He had grabbed both sides of the ladder by this time, and with head in
+the _crotch_ was sloshing ashore, the water squirting from the tops of
+his boots.
+
+"Shake! Mighty good of you fellows to come all the way down to see me.
+Here, you stone-cutter--help me off with these boots. Marie's getting
+luncheon. Don't touch that canvas--all this morning's work--got to work
+early." (It looked to be a finished picture to me.)
+
+He was flat on the grass now, his legs in the air like an acrobat about
+to balance a globe, the water pouring from his wading boots, soaking the
+rest of him, all three of us tugging away--I at his head, the Sculptor
+at his feet. How Marie ever helped him squirm out of this diving-suit
+was more than I could tell.
+
+We had started for the mill now, the Man from the Quarter lugging the
+boots, still hoping there might be some truth in the trout story, the
+Sculptor with the palette (big as a tea-tray), Knight with the ladder,
+and I with the wet canvas.
+
+Again the cry rang out: "Marie! _Marie!_" and again the old woman
+started on a run--for the kitchen this time (she had been listening
+for this halloo--he generally came in wringing wet)--reappearing as we
+reached the hall door, her apron full of clothes swept from a drying
+line stretched before the big, all-embracing fireplace. These she
+carried ahead of us upstairs and deposited on the small iron bedstead
+in the painter's own room, Knight close behind, his wet socks making
+Man-Friday footprints in the middle of each well-scrubbed step. Once
+there, Knight dodged into a closet, wriggled himself loose, and was out
+again with half of Marie's apronful covering his chest and legs.
+
+It was easy to see where the power of his brush lay. No timid,
+uncertain, niggling stroke ever came from that torso or forearm or
+thigh. He hewed with a broad axe, not with a chisel, and he hewed
+true--that was the joy of it. The men of Meissonier's time, like the old
+Dutchmen, worked from their knuckle joints. These new painters, in their
+new technique--new to some--old really, as that of Velasquez and Frans
+Hals--swing their brushes from their spinal columns down their forearms
+(Knight's biceps measure seventeen inches) and out through their
+finger-tips, with something of the rhythm and force of an old-time
+blacksmith welding a tire. Broad chests, big boilers, strong arms,
+straight legs, and stiff backbones have much to do with success in
+life--more than we give them credit for. Instead of measuring men's
+heads, it would be just as well, once in a while, to slip the tape
+around their chests and waists. Steam is what makes the wheels go
+round, and steam is well-digested fuel and a place to put it. With
+this equipment a man can put "GO" into his business, strength into
+his literature, virility into his brush; without it he may succeed in
+selling spool cotton or bobbins, may write pink poems for the multitude
+and cover wooden panels with cardinals and ladies of high degree; in
+real satin and life-like lace, but no part of his output will take a
+full man's breath away.
+
+*****
+
+Sunshine, flowers, open windows letting in the cool breezes from meadow
+and stream; an old beamed ceiling, smoke-browned by countless pipes;
+walls covered with sketches of every nook and corner about us; a table
+for four, heaped with melons, grapes, cheese, and flanked by ten-pin
+bottles just out of the brook; good-fellowship, harmony of ideas,
+courage of convictions--with no heads swelled to an unnatural size; four
+appetites--enormous, prodigious appetites; Knight for host and Marie as
+high chamberlainess, make the feast of Lucullus and the afternoon teas
+of Cleopatra but so many quick lunches served in the rush hour of a
+downtown restaurant! Not only were the trout-baked-in cream (Marie's
+specialty) all that the Sculptor had claimed for them, but the
+fried chicken, souffl�s--everything, in fact, that the dear woman
+served--would have gained a Blue Ribbon had she filled the plate of any
+committeeman making the award.
+
+With the coffee and cigars (cigarettes had been smoked with every
+course--it was that kind of a feast) the four mouths had a breathing
+spell.
+
+Up to this time the talk had been a staccato performance between
+mouthfuls:
+
+"Yes--came near smashing a donkey--don't care if I do--no--no gravy"
+(Sculptor). "Let me put an extra bubble in your glass" (Knight). "These
+fish are as firm as the Adirondack trout" (Man from the Quarter). "More
+cream--thank you. Marie!" (Knight, of course) "more butter." "Donkey
+wasn't the only thing we missed--grazed a baby carriage and--" (Scribe).
+"I'm going to try a red ibis after luncheon and a miller for a tail
+fly--pass the melon" (Man from the Quarter): That sort of hurried talk
+without logical beginning or ending.
+
+But now each man had a comfortable chair, and filled it with shoulders
+hidden deep in its capacious depths, and legs straight out, only the
+arms and hands free enough to be within reach of the match-safe and
+thimble glasses. And with the ease and comfort of it all the talk itself
+slowed down to a pace more in harmony with that peace which passeth all
+understanding--unless you've a seat at the table.
+
+The several masters of the outdoor school were now called up, their
+merits discussed and their failings hammered: Thaulow, Sorolla y
+Bastida, the new Spanish wonder, whose exhibition the month before
+had astonished and delighted Paris: the Glasgow school; Zorn, Sargent,
+Winslow Homer--all the men of the direct, forceful school, men who
+swing their brushes from their spines instead of their finger-tips--were
+slashed into and made mincemeat of or extolled to the skies. Then
+the "patty-pats," with their little dabs of yellow, blue, and red,
+in imitation of the master Monet; the "slick and slimies," and the
+"woollies"--the men who essayed the vague, mysterious, and obscure--were
+set up and knocked down one after the other, as is the custom with all
+groups of painters the world over when the never-ending question of
+technique is tossed into the middle of the arena.
+
+Outdoor work next came into review and the discomforts and hardships
+a painter must go through to get what he is after, the Man from the
+Quarter defending the sit-by-the-fire fellows.
+
+"No use making a submarine diver of yourself, Knight," he growled.
+"Go and look at it and then come home and paint the impression and put
+something of yourself into it."
+
+Knight threw his head back and laughed. "I'd rather put the brook
+in--all of it."
+
+"But I don't see why you've got to get soaked to the skin every time you
+want to make a sketch."
+
+"The soaking is what helps," replied Knight, reaching for a match. "I
+like to feel I'm drink-some of it in. Then, when you're right in the
+middle of it you don't put on any airs and try to improve on what's
+before you and spoil it with detail. One dimple on a girl's cheek is
+charming; two--and you send for the doctor. And she's so simple when you
+look into her face--I'm talking of the brook now, not the girl--and it's
+so easy to put her down as she is, not the form and color only, but the
+_mood_ in which you find her. A brook is worse, really, than your best
+girl in the lightning changes she can go through--laughing, crying,
+coquetting--just as the mood seizes her. There, for instance,
+hanging over your head is a 'gray day"'--and he pointed to one of his
+running-water sketches tacked to the wall. "I tried to cheer her up a
+little with touches of warm tones here and there--all lies--same kind
+you tell your own chickabiddy when she's blue--but she wouldn't have it
+and cried straight ahead for four hours until the sun came out; but I
+was through by that time and waded ashore. You can see for yourselves
+how unhappy she was." He spoke as if the sketch was alive--and it was.
+
+"But I always work out of doors that way," he continued. "In winter up
+in Holland I sit in furs and wooden shoes, and often have to put alcohol
+in my water-cups to keep my colors from freezing. My big picture of 'The
+Torrent'--the one in the Toledo Art Gallery--was painted in January, and
+out of doors. As for the brushwork, I try to do the best I can. I used
+to tickle up things I painted; some of the fellows at Julian's believed
+in that, and so did Fleury and Lefebvre to some extent."
+
+"And when did you get over it?" I asked.
+
+"When my father persuaded me to send a bold sketch to the Volney Club,
+which I had done to please myself, and which they hung and bought. So I
+said to myself: 'Why trim, clean up, and make pretty a picture, when by
+simply painting what I love in nature in a free, breezy manner while my
+enthusiasm lasts--and it generally lasts until I get through;--sometimes
+it spills over to the next day--I please myself and a lot of people
+beside."
+
+We were all on our feet now examining the sketches--all running-brook
+studies--most of them made in that same pair of high-water boots. No one
+but the late Fritz Thaulow approaches him in giving the reality of this
+most difficult subject for an outdoor painter. The ocean surf repeats
+itself in its recurl and swash and by close watching a painter has often
+a chance to use his "second barrel," so to speak, but the upturned
+face of an unruly brook-is not only million-tinted and endless in its
+expression, but so sensitive in its reflections that every passing cloud
+and patch of blue above it saddens or cheers it.
+
+"Yes, painting water is enough to drive you mad," burst out Knight, "but
+I don't intend to paint anything else--not for years, any way. Hired the
+mill so I could paint the water running _away_ from you downhill. That's
+going to take a good many years to get hold of, but I'm going to stick
+it out. I can't always paint it from the banks, not if I want to study
+the middle ripples at my feet, and these are the ones that run out of
+your canvas just above your name-plate. _Got_ to stand in it, I tell
+you. Then you get the drawing, and the drawing is what counts. Oh, I
+love it!" Knight stretched his big arms and legs and sprang from his
+chair.
+
+"Really, fellows, I don't know anything about it. All I do is to let
+myself go. I always _feel_ more than I _see_, and so my brush has a
+devil of a job to keep up. Marie! _Marie!_"
+
+Had the good woman been a mile down the brook she could have heard
+him--she was only in the next room. "Bring in the boots--two pairs this
+time--we're going fishing. And, Marie--has the chauffeur had anything to
+eat?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Anything to drink?"
+
+"No, monsieur."
+
+"_What!_ Hand him this," and he grabbed a half-empty bottle from the
+table.
+
+I sprang forward and caught it before Marie got her fingers around it.
+
+"Not if I know it!" I cried. "We've got to get back to Dives. When he
+lands me inside my garden at the inn he shall have a magnum, but not a
+drop till he does."
+
+*****
+
+When the two had gone the Sculptor and I leaned back in our chairs and
+lighted fresh cigars. My enthusiasm has not cooled for the sports of
+my youth. With a comfortable stool, a well-filled basket, and a long
+jointed rod, I, like many another staid old painter, can still get
+an amazing amount of enjoyment watching a floating cork, but I
+didn't propose to follow those two lunatics. I knew the Man from the
+Quarter--had known him from the day of his birth--and knew what he would
+do and where he would go (over his head sometimes) for a poor devil of a
+fish half as long as his finger, and I had had positive evidence of
+what the other web-footed duck thought of ice-cold water. No, I'd take a
+little sugar in mine, if you please, and put a drop of--but the Sculptor
+had already foreseen and was then forestalling my needs, so we leaned
+back in our chairs once more.
+
+Again the talk covered wide reaches.
+
+"Great boy, Knight," broke out the Sculptor in a sudden burst of
+enthusiasm over his friend. "You ought to see him handle a crowd when
+he's at work. He knows the French people--never gets mad. He bought a
+calf for Marie last week, and drove it home himself. Told me it had ten
+legs, four heads, and twenty tails before he got it here. Old woman lost
+hers and Knight bought her another--he'd bring her a herd if she wanted
+it. All the way from the market the boys kept up a running fire of
+criticism. When the ringleader came too near, Knight sprang at him with
+a yelp like a dog's. The boy was so taken aback that he ran. Then
+Knight roared with laughter, and in an instant the whole crowd were his
+friends--two of them helped him get the calf out of town. When a French
+crowd laughs with you you can do anything with them. He had had more fun
+bringing home that calf, he told me, than he'd had for weeks, and he's a
+wonder at having a good time."
+
+Then followed--much of which was news to me--an account of the painter's
+earlier life and successes.
+
+He was born in Paris, August 3, 1873; his father, Ridgway Knight, the
+distinguished painter, and his mother, who was Rebecca Morris Webster,
+both being Philadelphians. Not only is he, therefore, of true American
+descent, but his eight great-grandparents were Americans, dating back
+to Thomas Ridgway, who was born in Delaware in 1713. Thus by both the
+French and American laws he is an American citizen.
+
+At fourteen he was sent to Chigwell School in England by his father,
+to have "art knocked out of him" by the uncongenial surroundings of the
+quiet old school where the great William Penn had been taught to read
+and write. He left in 1890, having won the Special Classical Prize,
+Oxford and Cambridge certificate Prize, besides prizes for carpentering,
+gymnasium, running, and "putting the weight."
+
+At home the boy always drew and painted for pleasure, as well as at
+school during the half-holidays. Some water-colors made during a holiday
+trip in Brittany in 1890 decided his father to allow him to follow art
+as a career. He entered Julian's studio, with Jules Lefebvre and Tony
+Robert-Fleury as professors in 1891, and studied from the nude during
+the five following winters. His principal work was, however, done in the
+country at and around Poissy, under the guidance of his father.
+
+His exhibits in the Paris Salon (_artistes Fran�ais_) were twenty-four
+oils and water-colors from 1894 to 1906, obtaining an honorable mention
+in 1901 with the "Thames at Whitchurch"; a gold medal, third class, in
+1905, with "The Torrent"; and a gold medal, second class, in 1906, with
+his triptych "The Giant Cities" (New York, Paris, London), which makes
+him _hors concours_, with the great distinction of being the first
+American landscape painter to get two Salon gold medals in two
+consecutive years. He won also a bronze medal in the American section
+of the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 with a water-color, and a gold
+medal of honor at Rheims, Cherbourg, Geneva, and Nantes.
+
+His most important pictures are: "The Torrent," 4 1/2 x 6 feet, owned by
+the Toledo Art Gallery; "The Abandoned Mill," 4 1/2 x 6 feet; "The
+End of the Island," 6 x 8 feet; "Clisson Castle," 3 x 4 1/2 feet, a
+water-color; "After the Storm," 3 x 5 feet; and "Winter in Holland," 3x4
+feet.
+
+I had listened to the Sculptor's brief account of his friend's progress
+with calm attention, but it had not altered my opinion of the man or
+his genius. None of it really interested me except that somebody beside
+myself had found out the lad's qualities--for to me he is still a lad.
+None of the jury who made the awards ever looked below the paint--that
+is, if they were like other juries the world over. They saw the
+brush-mark, no doubt, but they missed the breeze that came with it--was
+its life, really--a breeze that swept through and out of him, blowing
+side by side with genius and good health--a wind of destiny, perhaps,
+that will carry him to climes that other men know not of.
+
+But what a refreshing thing, this breeze, to come out of a man, and what
+a refreshing kind of a man for it to come out of! No pose, no effort
+to fill a No. 8 hat with a No. 7 head; just a simple, conscientious,
+hard-working young painter, humble-minded in the presence of his
+goddess, and full to overflowing with an uncontrollable spontaneity.
+This in itself was worth risking one's neck to see.
+
+Again the cry rang out, "Marie!" and two half-drowned water-rats stepped
+in; the Man from the Quarter in his underpinning--his pair of boots
+leaked and he had stripped them off--and Knight with his own half
+full of water. Both roared with laughter at Marie tugging at the huge
+white-rubber boots, the floor she had scrubbed so conscientiously
+spattered with sand and water.
+
+Then began the customary recriminations: "Hadn't been for you I wouldn't
+have lost him!" "What had I to do with it?" etc., etc.--the same old
+story when neither gets a bite.
+
+That night, bumping over the thank-you-marms, flashing through darkened
+villages, and scooting in a dead heat along ribboned roads ghostly
+white in the starlight, on the way back to my garden--and we did arrive
+safely, and the chauffeur had his magnum (that is, his share of it)--I
+could not help saying to myself:
+
+"Yes, it's good to be young and bouyant, but it's better to be one's
+self."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man In The High-Water Boots, by 
+F. Hopkinson Smith
+
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+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      The Man in the High-water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Man In The High-Water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Man In The High-Water Boots
+       1909
+
+Author: F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23701]
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By F. Hopkinson Smith <br /><br /> 1909
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the
+      kind of charm that makes you glad when he comes and sorry when he goes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Experience and Pluck.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These I knew and <i>loved</i>; even now the cockles of my heart warm up
+      when I think of them. Others I knew and <i>liked</i>; the difference being
+      simply one of personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time it is a painter who crosses my path&mdash;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 &ldquo;blew in&rdquo; (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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a long, low,
+      double-jointed crouching tiger&mdash;a forty-devil-power machine, fearing
+      neither God nor man, and which is bound sooner or later to come to an
+      untimely end and the scrap heap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All about, fringing the tea tables and filling the summer air with their
+      chatter and laughter, were gathered not only the cream, but the very top
+      skimmings of all the fashion and folly of Trouville&mdash;twenty minutes
+      away, automobile time&mdash;their blossoming hats, full-blown parasols,
+      and pink and white veils adding another flower-bed to the quaint old
+      courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the return of the Man from the Latin Quarter, his other guest, who
+      knew the ins and outs of the cellar, and who had gone in search of a
+      certain vintage known only to the initiated (don't forget to ask for it
+      when you go&mdash;it has no label, but the cork is sealed with yellow wax;
+      M. Ramois, the good landlord, will know the kind&mdash;<i>if he thinks you
+      do</i>), our host, the Sculptor, his mind still on his friend the painter,
+      looked up and said, as he reached for the corkscrew:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not go to-morrow? The mill is the most picturesque thing you ever saw&mdash;an
+      old Louis XIII house and mill on the River Rille near Beaumont-le-Roger,
+      once inhabited by the poet Chateaubriand. The river runs underground in
+      the sands for some distance and comes out a few miles from Knight's&mdash;cold
+      as ice and clear as crystal and packed full of trout. Besides Knight is at
+      home&mdash;had a line from him this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Man from the Quarter laid down his glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How far is it?&rdquo; This man is so daft on fishing that he has been known to
+      kiss the first trout he hooks in the spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only fifty-six miles, my dear boy&mdash;run you over in an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And everything else that gets in the way,&rdquo; said the Man from the Quarter,
+      moving his glass nearer the Sculptor's elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No danger of that&mdash;I've got a siren that you can hear for a mile&mdash;but
+      really, it's only a step.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      I once slid down a salt mine on a pair of summer pantaloons and brought up
+      in total darkness (a godsend under the circumstances). I still shudder
+      when I think of the speed; of the way my hair tried to leave my scalp; of
+      the peculiar blink in my eyes; of the hours it took to live through forty
+      seconds; and of my final halt in the middle of a moon-faced,
+      round-paunched German who was paid a mark for saving the bones and necks
+      of idiots like myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time the sliding was done in an overcoat (although the summer sun was
+      blazing), a steamer cap, and a pair of goggles. First there came a shivery
+      chuggetty-chug, as if the beast was shaking himself loose. Next a noise
+      like the opening of a bolt in an iron cage, and then the Inn of William
+      the Conqueror&mdash;the village-beach, inlet&mdash;wide sea, streamed
+      behind like a panorama run at high pressure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first swoop was along the sea, a whirl into Houlgate, a mad dash
+      through the village, dogs and chickens running for dear life, and out
+      again with the deadly rush of a belated wild goose hurrying to a southern
+      clime. Our host sat beside the chauffeur, who looked like the demon in a
+      ballet in his goggles and skull-cap. The Man from the Quarter and I
+      crouched on the rear seats, our eyes on the turn of the road ahead. What
+      we had left behind, or what might be on either side of us was of no
+      moment; what would come around that far-distant curve a mile away and a
+      minute off was what troubled us. The demon and the Sculptor were as cool
+      as the captain and first mate on the bridge of a liner in a gale; the Man
+      from the Quarter stared doggedly ahead; I was too scared for scenery and
+      too proud to ask the Sculptor to slow down, so I thought of my sins and
+      slowly murmured, &ldquo;Now I lay me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When we got to the top of the last hill and had swirled into the straight
+      broad turnpike leading to Lisieux, the Sculptor spoke in an undertone to
+      the demon, did something with his foot or hand or teeth&mdash;everything
+      with which he could push, pull, or bite was busy&mdash;and the machine, as
+      if struck by a lash, sprang into space. Trees, fences, little farmhouses,
+      hay-stacks, canvas-covered wagons, frightened children, dogs, now went by
+      in blurred outlines; ten miles, thirty miles, then a string of villages,
+      Liseau among them, the siren shrieking like a lost soul sinking into
+      perdition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Watch the road to the right,&rdquo; wheezed the Sculptor between his breaths;
+      &ldquo;that is where the Egyptian prince was killed&mdash;&rdquo; this over his
+      shoulder to me&mdash;&ldquo;a tram-car hit him&mdash;you can see the hole in the
+      bank. Made that last mile in sixty-five seconds&mdash;running fifty-nine
+      now&mdash;look out for that cross-road&mdash;'Wow-wow-oo&mdash;wow-wow'&rdquo;
+       (siren). &ldquo;Damn that market cart&mdash;'Wow-wow-o-o-wow.'&rdquo; &ldquo;Slow up, or
+      we'll be on top of that donkey&mdash;just grazed it. Can't tell what a
+      donkey will do when a girl's driving it.&rdquo; 'Wow-oo-w-o&mdash;.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up a long hill now, down into a valley&mdash;the road like a piece of
+      white tape stretching ahead&mdash;past school-houses, barns, market
+      gardens; into dense woods, out on to level plains bare of a tree&mdash;one
+      mad, devilish, brutal rush, with every man's eyes glued to the turn of the
+      road ahead, which every half minute swerved, straightened, swerved again;
+      now blocked by trees, now opening out, only to close, twist, and squirm
+      anew. Great fun this, gambling with death, knowing that from behind any
+      bush, beyond every hill crest, and around each curve there may spring
+      something that will make assorted junk of your machine and send you to
+      Ballyhack!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one more hill,&rdquo; breathed the Sculptor, wiping the caked dust from
+      his lips. Woo-oo-wow-o-o (nurse with a baby-carriage this time, running
+      into the bushes like a frightened rabbit). &ldquo;See the mill stream&mdash;that's
+      it flashing in the sunlight! See the roof of the mill? That's Aston
+      Knight's! Down brakes! All out&mdash;fifty-six miles in one hour and
+      twenty-two minutes! Not bad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang out&mdash;so did the Man from the Quarter&mdash;the flash from
+      the mill stream glistening in the sunlight had set his blood to tingling;
+      as for myself, no sheltering doorway had ever looked so inviting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie! <i>Marie!</i> Where's monsieur?&rdquo; cried out the Sculptor from his
+      seat beside the demon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up-stairs, I think,&rdquo; answered a stout, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked woman,
+      wiping her hand and arms on her apron as she spoke. She had started on a
+      run from the brook's edge behind the house, where she had been washing,
+      when she heard the shriek of the siren, but the machine had pulled up
+      before she could reach the door-step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He went out early, but I think he's back now. Come in, come in, all of
+      you. I'm glad to see you&mdash;so will he be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie was cook, housemaid, valet, mother, doctor, and any number of things
+      beside to Knight; just as in the village across the stream where she lived&mdash;or
+      rather slept o' nights&mdash;she was billposter, bell-ringer, and town
+      crier, to say nothing of her being the mother of eleven children, all her
+      own&mdash;Knight being the adopted twelfth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mill might as well be without water as without Marie,&rdquo; said the
+      Sculptor. &ldquo;Wait until you taste her baked trout&mdash;the chef at the
+      Voisin is a fool beside her.&rdquo; We had all shaken the dear woman's hand how
+      and had preceded her into the square hall filled with easels, fresh
+      canvases, paintings hung on hooks to dry, pots of brushes, rain coats,
+      sample racks of hats, and the like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time the beast outside was snorting like a race-horse catching
+      its breath after a run, the demon walking in front of it, examining its
+      teeth, or mouth, or eyes, or whatever you do examine when you go poking
+      around in front of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom&mdash;evidently
+      Knight's&mdash;full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels
+      lining the walls; and then into another&mdash;evidently the guest's room&mdash;all
+      lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old
+      portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn,
+      grumbling, &ldquo;Just like him to try and fool us,&rdquo; but no trace of Knight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus bringing
+      clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of willows
+      shading the rushing stream below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Louis! <i>Louis!</i> Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There came an halloo&mdash;faint&mdash;downstream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get him
+      out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an
+      uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself
+      barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a crowded
+      bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta, where I used
+      the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when years ago, I clung
+      to the platform of an elevated station in an effort to get, between the
+      legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines of the spider-web
+      connecting the two cities. I have watched, too, other painters in equally
+      uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door painters; not steam-heated,
+      easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda or photos to copy from) but it
+      was the first time in all my varied experiences that I had ever come upon
+      a painter standing up to his armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other
+      kind of stream, the water breaking against his body as a rock breasts a
+      torrent, and he working away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder
+      high enough to scale the mill's roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fish?&rdquo; yelled the Man from the Quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, one squirming around my knees now&mdash;shipped him a minute ago&mdash;foot
+      slipped. Awful glad to see you&mdash;stay where you are till I get this
+      high light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay where I am!&rdquo; bellowed the Sculptor. &ldquo;Do you think I'm St. Peter or
+      some long-legged crane that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right&mdash;I'm coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had grabbed both sides of the ladder by this time, and with head in the
+      <i>crotch</i> was sloshing ashore, the water squirting from the tops of
+      his boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shake! Mighty good of you fellows to come all the way down to see me.
+      Here, you stone-cutter&mdash;help me off with these boots. Marie's getting
+      luncheon. Don't touch that canvas&mdash;all this morning's work&mdash;got
+      to work early.&rdquo; (It looked to be a finished picture to me.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was flat on the grass now, his legs in the air like an acrobat about to
+      balance a globe, the water pouring from his wading boots, soaking the rest
+      of him, all three of us tugging away&mdash;I at his head, the Sculptor at
+      his feet. How Marie ever helped him squirm out of this diving-suit was
+      more than I could tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had started for the mill now, the Man from the Quarter lugging the
+      boots, still hoping there might be some truth in the trout story, the
+      Sculptor with the palette (big as a tea-tray), Knight with the ladder, and
+      I with the wet canvas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the cry rang out: &ldquo;Marie! <i>Marie!</i>&rdquo; and again the old woman
+      started on a run&mdash;for the kitchen this time (she had been listening
+      for this halloo&mdash;he generally came in wringing wet)&mdash;reappearing
+      as we reached the hall door, her apron full of clothes swept from a drying
+      line stretched before the big, all-embracing fireplace. These she carried
+      ahead of us upstairs and deposited on the small iron bedstead in the
+      painter's own room, Knight close behind, his wet socks making Man-Friday
+      footprints in the middle of each well-scrubbed step. Once there, Knight
+      dodged into a closet, wriggled himself loose, and was out again with half
+      of Marie's apronful covering his chest and legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was easy to see where the power of his brush lay. No timid, uncertain,
+      niggling stroke ever came from that torso or forearm or thigh. He hewed
+      with a broad axe, not with a chisel, and he hewed true&mdash;that was the
+      joy of it. The men of Meissonier's time, like the old Dutchmen, worked
+      from their knuckle joints. These new painters, in their new technique&mdash;new
+      to some&mdash;old really, as that of Velasquez and Frans Hals&mdash;swing
+      their brushes from their spinal columns down their forearms (Knight's
+      biceps measure seventeen inches) and out through their finger-tips, with
+      something of the rhythm and force of an old-time blacksmith welding a
+      tire. Broad chests, big boilers, strong arms, straight legs, and stiff
+      backbones have much to do with success in life&mdash;more than we give
+      them credit for. Instead of measuring men's heads, it would be just as
+      well, once in a while, to slip the tape around their chests and waists.
+      Steam is what makes the wheels go round, and steam is well-digested fuel
+      and a place to put it. With this equipment a man can put &ldquo;GO&rdquo; into his
+      business, strength into his literature, virility into his brush; without
+      it he may succeed in selling spool cotton or bobbins, may write pink poems
+      for the multitude and cover wooden panels with cardinals and ladies of
+      high degree; in real satin and life-like lace, but no part of his output
+      will take a full man's breath away.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      Sunshine, flowers, open windows letting in the cool breezes from meadow
+      and stream; an old beamed ceiling, smoke-browned by countless pipes; walls
+      covered with sketches of every nook and corner about us; a table for four,
+      heaped with melons, grapes, cheese, and flanked by ten-pin bottles just
+      out of the brook; good-fellowship, harmony of ideas, courage of
+      convictions&mdash;with no heads swelled to an unnatural size; four
+      appetites&mdash;enormous, prodigious appetites; Knight for host and Marie
+      as high chamberlainess, make the feast of Lucullus and the afternoon teas
+      of Cleopatra but so many quick lunches served in the rush hour of a
+      downtown restaurant! Not only were the trout-baked-in cream (Marie's
+      specialty) all that the Sculptor had claimed for them, but the fried
+      chicken, soufflés&mdash;everything, in fact, that the dear woman served&mdash;would
+      have gained a Blue Ribbon had she filled the plate of any committeeman
+      making the award.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coffee and cigars (cigarettes had been smoked with every course&mdash;it
+      was that kind of a feast) the four mouths had a breathing spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up to this time the talk had been a staccato performance between
+      mouthfuls:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;came near smashing a donkey&mdash;don't care if I do&mdash;no&mdash;no
+      gravy&rdquo; (Sculptor). &ldquo;Let me put an extra bubble in your glass&rdquo; (Knight).
+      &ldquo;These fish are as firm as the Adirondack trout&rdquo; (Man from the Quarter).
+      &ldquo;More cream&mdash;thank you. Marie!&rdquo; (Knight, of course) &ldquo;more butter.&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Donkey wasn't the only thing we missed&mdash;grazed a baby carriage and&mdash;&rdquo;
+       (Scribe). &ldquo;I'm going to try a red ibis after luncheon and a miller for a
+      tail fly&mdash;pass the melon&rdquo; (Man from the Quarter): That sort of
+      hurried talk without logical beginning or ending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now each man had a comfortable chair, and filled it with shoulders
+      hidden deep in its capacious depths, and legs straight out, only the arms
+      and hands free enough to be within reach of the match-safe and thimble
+      glasses. And with the ease and comfort of it all the talk itself slowed
+      down to a pace more in harmony with that peace which passeth all
+      understanding&mdash;unless you've a seat at the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The several masters of the outdoor school were now called up, their merits
+      discussed and their failings hammered: Thaulow, Sorolla y Bastida, the new
+      Spanish wonder, whose exhibition the month before had astonished and
+      delighted Paris: the Glasgow school; Zorn, Sargent, Winslow Homer&mdash;all
+      the men of the direct, forceful school, men who swing their brushes from
+      their spines instead of their finger-tips&mdash;were slashed into and made
+      mincemeat of or extolled to the skies. Then the &ldquo;patty-pats,&rdquo; with their
+      little dabs of yellow, blue, and red, in imitation of the master Monet;
+      the &ldquo;slick and slimies,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;woollies&rdquo;&mdash;the men who essayed the
+      vague, mysterious, and obscure&mdash;were set up and knocked down one
+      after the other, as is the custom with all groups of painters the world
+      over when the never-ending question of technique is tossed into the middle
+      of the arena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outdoor work next came into review and the discomforts and hardships a
+      painter must go through to get what he is after, the Man from the Quarter
+      defending the sit-by-the-fire fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No use making a submarine diver of yourself, Knight,&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Go and
+      look at it and then come home and paint the impression and put something
+      of yourself into it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Knight threw his head back and laughed. &ldquo;I'd rather put the brook in&mdash;all
+      of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't see why you've got to get soaked to the skin every time you
+      want to make a sketch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The soaking is what helps,&rdquo; replied Knight, reaching for a match. &ldquo;I like
+      to feel I'm drink-some of it in. Then, when you're right in the middle of
+      it you don't put on any airs and try to improve on what's before you and
+      spoil it with detail. One dimple on a girl's cheek is charming; two&mdash;and
+      you send for the doctor. And she's so simple when you look into her face&mdash;I'm
+      talking of the brook now, not the girl&mdash;and it's so easy to put her
+      down as she is, not the form and color only, but the <i>mood</i> in which
+      you find her. A brook is worse, really, than your best girl in the
+      lightning changes she can go through&mdash;laughing, crying, coquetting&mdash;just
+      as the mood seizes her. There, for instance, hanging over your head is a
+      'gray day&rdquo;'&mdash;and he pointed to one of his running-water sketches
+      tacked to the wall. &ldquo;I tried to cheer her up a little with touches of warm
+      tones here and there&mdash;all lies&mdash;same kind you tell your own
+      chickabiddy when she's blue&mdash;but she wouldn't have it and cried
+      straight ahead for four hours until the sun came out; but I was through by
+      that time and waded ashore. You can see for yourselves how unhappy she
+      was.&rdquo; He spoke as if the sketch was alive&mdash;and it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I always work out of doors that way,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;In winter up in
+      Holland I sit in furs and wooden shoes, and often have to put alcohol in
+      my water-cups to keep my colors from freezing. My big picture of 'The
+      Torrent'&mdash;the one in the Toledo Art Gallery&mdash;was painted in
+      January, and out of doors. As for the brushwork, I try to do the best I
+      can. I used to tickle up things I painted; some of the fellows at Julian's
+      believed in that, and so did Fleury and Lefebvre to some extent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when did you get over it?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When my father persuaded me to send a bold sketch to the Volney Club,
+      which I had done to please myself, and which they hung and bought. So I
+      said to myself: 'Why trim, clean up, and make pretty a picture, when by
+      simply painting what I love in nature in a free, breezy manner while my
+      enthusiasm lasts&mdash;and it generally lasts until I get through;&mdash;sometimes
+      it spills over to the next day&mdash;I please myself and a lot of people
+      beside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were all on our feet now examining the sketches&mdash;all running-brook
+      studies&mdash;most of them made in that same pair of high-water boots. No
+      one but the late Fritz Thaulow approaches him in giving the reality of
+      this most difficult subject for an outdoor painter. The ocean surf repeats
+      itself in its recurl and swash and by close watching a painter has often a
+      chance to use his &ldquo;second barrel,&rdquo; so to speak, but the upturned face of
+      an unruly brook-is not only million-tinted and endless in its expression,
+      but so sensitive in its reflections that every passing cloud and patch of
+      blue above it saddens or cheers it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, painting water is enough to drive you mad,&rdquo; burst out Knight, &ldquo;but I
+      don't intend to paint anything else&mdash;not for years, any way. Hired
+      the mill so I could paint the water running <i>away</i> from you downhill.
+      That's going to take a good many years to get hold of, but I'm going to
+      stick it out. I can't always paint it from the banks, not if I want to
+      study the middle ripples at my feet, and these are the ones that run out
+      of your canvas just above your name-plate. <i>Got</i> to stand in it, I
+      tell you. Then you get the drawing, and the drawing is what counts. Oh, I
+      love it!&rdquo; Knight stretched his big arms and legs and sprang from his
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, fellows, I don't know anything about it. All I do is to let
+      myself go. I always <i>feel</i> more than I <i>see</i>, and so my brush
+      has a devil of a job to keep up. Marie! <i>Marie!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the good woman been a mile down the brook she could have heard him&mdash;she
+      was only in the next room. &ldquo;Bring in the boots&mdash;two pairs this time&mdash;we're
+      going fishing. And, Marie&mdash;has the chauffeur had anything to eat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, monsieur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything to drink?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, monsieur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>What!</i> Hand him this,&rdquo; and he grabbed a half-empty bottle from the
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang forward and caught it before Marie got her fingers around it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if I know it!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;We've got to get back to Dives. When he
+      lands me inside my garden at the inn he shall have a magnum, but not a
+      drop till he does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      When the two had gone the Sculptor and I leaned back in our chairs and
+      lighted fresh cigars. My enthusiasm has not cooled for the sports of my
+      youth. With a comfortable stool, a well-filled basket, and a long jointed
+      rod, I, like many another staid old painter, can still get an amazing
+      amount of enjoyment watching a floating cork, but I didn't propose to
+      follow those two lunatics. I knew the Man from the Quarter&mdash;had known
+      him from the day of his birth&mdash;and knew what he would do and where he
+      would go (over his head sometimes) for a poor devil of a fish half as long
+      as his finger, and I had had positive evidence of what the other
+      web-footed duck thought of ice-cold water. No, I'd take a little sugar in
+      mine, if you please, and put a drop of&mdash;but the Sculptor had already
+      foreseen and was then forestalling my needs, so we leaned back in our
+      chairs once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the talk covered wide reaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great boy, Knight,&rdquo; broke out the Sculptor in a sudden burst of
+      enthusiasm over his friend. &ldquo;You ought to see him handle a crowd when he's
+      at work. He knows the French people&mdash;never gets mad. He bought a calf
+      for Marie last week, and drove it home himself. Told me it had ten legs,
+      four heads, and twenty tails before he got it here. Old woman lost hers
+      and Knight bought her another&mdash;he'd bring her a herd if she wanted
+      it. All the way from the market the boys kept up a running fire of
+      criticism. When the ringleader came too near, Knight sprang at him with a
+      yelp like a dog's. The boy was so taken aback that he ran. Then Knight
+      roared with laughter, and in an instant the whole crowd were his friends&mdash;two
+      of them helped him get the calf out of town. When a French crowd laughs
+      with you you can do anything with them. He had had more fun bringing home
+      that calf, he told me, than he'd had for weeks, and he's a wonder at
+      having a good time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then followed&mdash;much of which was news to me&mdash;an account of the
+      painter's earlier life and successes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was born in Paris, August 3, 1873; his father, Ridgway Knight, the
+      distinguished painter, and his mother, who was Rebecca Morris Webster,
+      both being Philadelphians. Not only is he, therefore, of true American
+      descent, but his eight great-grandparents were Americans, dating back to
+      Thomas Ridgway, who was born in Delaware in 1713. Thus by both the French
+      and American laws he is an American citizen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At fourteen he was sent to Chigwell School in England by his father, to
+      have &ldquo;art knocked out of him&rdquo; by the uncongenial surroundings of the quiet
+      old school where the great William Penn had been taught to read and write.
+      He left in 1890, having won the Special Classical Prize, Oxford and
+      Cambridge certificate Prize, besides prizes for carpentering, gymnasium,
+      running, and &ldquo;putting the weight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At home the boy always drew and painted for pleasure, as well as at school
+      during the half-holidays. Some water-colors made during a holiday trip in
+      Brittany in 1890 decided his father to allow him to follow art as a
+      career. He entered Julian's studio, with Jules Lefebvre and Tony
+      Robert-Fleury as professors in 1891, and studied from the nude during the
+      five following winters. His principal work was, however, done in the
+      country at and around Poissy, under the guidance of his father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His exhibits in the Paris Salon (<i>artistes Français</i>) were
+      twenty-four oils and water-colors from 1894 to 1906, obtaining an
+      honorable mention in 1901 with the &ldquo;Thames at Whitchurch&rdquo;; a gold medal,
+      third class, in 1905, with &ldquo;The Torrent&rdquo;; and a gold medal, second class,
+      in 1906, with his triptych &ldquo;The Giant Cities&rdquo; (New York, Paris, London),
+      which makes him <i>hors concours</i>, with the great distinction of being
+      the first American landscape painter to get two Salon gold medals in two
+      consecutive years. He won also a bronze medal in the American section of
+      the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 with a water-color, and a gold
+      medal of honor at Rheims, Cherbourg, Geneva, and Nantes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His most important pictures are: &ldquo;The Torrent,&rdquo; 4 1/2 x 6 feet, owned by
+      the Toledo Art Gallery; &ldquo;The Abandoned Mill,&rdquo; 4 1/2 x 6 feet; &ldquo;The End of
+      the Island,&rdquo; 6 x 8 feet; &ldquo;Clisson Castle,&rdquo; 3 x 4 1/2 feet, a water-color;
+      &ldquo;After the Storm,&rdquo; 3 x 5 feet; and &ldquo;Winter in Holland,&rdquo; 3x4 feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had listened to the Sculptor's brief account of his friend's progress
+      with calm attention, but it had not altered my opinion of the man or his
+      genius. None of it really interested me except that somebody beside myself
+      had found out the lad's qualities&mdash;for to me he is still a lad. None
+      of the jury who made the awards ever looked below the paint&mdash;that is,
+      if they were like other juries the world over. They saw the brush-mark, no
+      doubt, but they missed the breeze that came with it&mdash;was its life,
+      really&mdash;a breeze that swept through and out of him, blowing side by
+      side with genius and good health&mdash;a wind of destiny, perhaps, that
+      will carry him to climes that other men know not of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what a refreshing thing, this breeze, to come out of a man, and what a
+      refreshing kind of a man for it to come out of! No pose, no effort to fill
+      a No. 8 hat with a No. 7 head; just a simple, conscientious, hard-working
+      young painter, humble-minded in the presence of his goddess, and full to
+      overflowing with an uncontrollable spontaneity. This in itself was worth
+      risking one's neck to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the cry rang out, &ldquo;Marie!&rdquo; and two half-drowned water-rats stepped
+      in; the Man from the Quarter in his underpinning&mdash;his pair of boots
+      leaked and he had stripped them off&mdash;and Knight with his own half
+      full of water. Both roared with laughter at Marie tugging at the huge
+      white-rubber boots, the floor she had scrubbed so conscientiously
+      spattered with sand and water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then began the customary recriminations: &ldquo;Hadn't been for you I wouldn't
+      have lost him!&rdquo; &ldquo;What had I to do with it?&rdquo; etc., etc.&mdash;the same old
+      story when neither gets a bite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, bumping over the thank-you-marms, flashing through darkened
+      villages, and scooting in a dead heat along ribboned roads ghostly white
+      in the starlight, on the way back to my garden&mdash;and we did arrive
+      safely, and the chauffeur had his magnum (that is, his share of it)&mdash;I
+      could not help saying to myself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it's good to be young and bouyant, but it's better to be one's
+      self.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</html>
diff --git a/23701.txt b/23701.txt
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+Project Gutenberg's The Man In The High-Water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+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
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
+
+
+
+
+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 long, low,
+double-jointed crouching tiger--a forty-devil-power machine, fearing
+neither God nor man, and which is bound sooner or later to come to an
+untimely end and the scrap heap.
+
+All about, fringing the tea tables and filling the summer air with their
+chatter and laughter, were gathered not only the cream, but the very
+top skimmings of all the fashion and folly of Trouville--twenty minutes
+away, automobile time--their blossoming hats, full-blown parasols,
+and pink and white veils adding another flower-bed to the quaint old
+courtyard.
+
+With the return of the Man from the Latin Quarter, his other guest, who
+knew the ins and outs of the cellar, and who had gone in search of a
+certain vintage known only to the initiated (don't forget to ask for it
+when you go--it has no label, but the cork is sealed with yellow wax; M.
+Ramois, the good landlord, will know the kind--_if he thinks you do_),
+our host, the Sculptor, his mind still on his friend the painter, looked
+up and said, as he reached for the corkscrew:
+
+"Why not go to-morrow? The mill is the most picturesque thing you
+ever saw--an old Louis XIII house and mill on the River Rille near
+Beaumont-le-Roger, once inhabited by the poet Chateaubriand. The river
+runs underground in the sands for some distance and comes out a few
+miles from Knight's--cold as ice and clear as crystal and packed full of
+trout. Besides Knight is at home--had a line from him this morning."
+
+The Man from the Quarter laid down his glass.
+
+"How far is it?" This man is so daft on fishing that he has been known
+to kiss the first trout he hooks in the spring.
+
+"Only fifty-six miles, my dear boy--run you over in an hour."
+
+"And everything else that gets in the way," said the Man from the
+Quarter, moving his glass nearer the Sculptor's elbow.
+
+"No danger of that--I've got a siren that you can hear for a mile--but
+really, it's only a step."
+
+*****
+
+I once slid down a salt mine on a pair of summer pantaloons and brought
+up in total darkness (a godsend under the circumstances). I still
+shudder when I think of the speed; of the way my hair tried to leave my
+scalp; of the peculiar blink in my eyes; of the hours it took to
+live through forty seconds; and of my final halt in the middle of a
+moon-faced, round-paunched German who was paid a mark for saving the
+bones and necks of idiots like myself.
+
+This time the sliding was done in an overcoat (although the summer sun
+was blazing), a steamer cap, and a pair of goggles. First there came a
+shivery chuggetty-chug, as if the beast was shaking himself loose. Next
+a noise like the opening of a bolt in an iron cage, and then the Inn
+of William the Conqueror--the village-beach, inlet--wide sea, streamed
+behind like a panorama run at high pressure.
+
+The first swoop was along the sea, a whirl into Houlgate, a mad dash
+through the village, dogs and chickens running for dear life, and
+out again with the deadly rush of a belated wild goose hurrying to a
+southern clime. Our host sat beside the chauffeur, who looked like the
+demon in a ballet in his goggles and skull-cap. The Man from the Quarter
+and I crouched on the rear seats, our eyes on the turn of the road
+ahead. What we had left behind, or what might be on either side of us
+was of no moment; what would come around that far-distant curve a mile
+away and a minute off was what troubled us. The demon and the Sculptor
+were as cool as the captain and first mate on the bridge of a liner in
+a gale; the Man from the Quarter stared doggedly ahead; I was too scared
+for scenery and too proud to ask the Sculptor to slow down, so I thought
+of my sins and slowly murmured, "Now I lay me."
+
+When we got to the top of the last hill and had swirled into the
+straight broad turnpike leading to Lisieux, the Sculptor spoke in
+an undertone to the demon, did something with his foot or hand or
+teeth--everything with which he could push, pull, or bite was busy--and
+the machine, as if struck by a lash, sprang into space. Trees, fences,
+little farmhouses, hay-stacks, canvas-covered wagons, frightened
+children, dogs, now went by in blurred outlines; ten miles, thirty
+miles, then a string of villages, Liseau among them, the siren shrieking
+like a lost soul sinking into perdition.
+
+"Watch the road to the right," wheezed the Sculptor between his breaths;
+"that is where the Egyptian prince was killed--" this over his shoulder
+to me--"a tram-car hit him--you can see the hole in the bank. Made that
+last mile in sixty-five seconds--running fifty-nine now--look out
+for that cross-road--'Wow-wow-oo--wow-wow'" (siren). "Damn that
+market cart--'Wow-wow-o-o-wow.'" "Slow up, or we'll be on top of that
+donkey--just grazed it. Can't tell what a donkey will do when a girl's
+driving it." 'Wow-oo-w-o--.'
+
+Up a long hill now, down into a valley--the road like a piece of white
+tape stretching ahead--past school-houses, barns, market gardens; into
+dense woods, out on to level plains bare of a tree--one mad, devilish,
+brutal rush, with every man's eyes glued to the turn of the road ahead,
+which every half minute swerved, straightened, swerved again; now
+blocked by trees, now opening out, only to close, twist, and squirm
+anew. Great fun this, gambling with death, knowing that from behind any
+bush, beyond every hill crest, and around each curve there may spring
+something that will make assorted junk of your machine and send you to
+Ballyhack!
+
+"Only one more hill," breathed the Sculptor, wiping the caked dust from
+his lips. Woo-oo-wow-o-o (nurse with a baby-carriage this time, running
+into the bushes like a frightened rabbit). "See the mill stream--that's
+it flashing in the sunlight! See the roof of the mill? That's Aston
+Knight's! Down brakes! All out--fifty-six miles in one hour and
+twenty-two minutes! Not bad!"
+
+I sprang out--so did the Man from the Quarter--the flash from the mill
+stream glistening in the sunlight had set his blood to tingling; as for
+myself, no sheltering doorway had ever looked so inviting.
+
+"Marie! _Marie!_ Where's monsieur?" cried out the Sculptor from his seat
+beside the demon.
+
+"Up-stairs, I think," answered a stout, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked woman,
+wiping her hand and arms on her apron as she spoke. She had started on a
+run from the brook's edge behind the house, where she had been washing,
+when she heard the shriek of the siren, but the machine had pulled up
+before she could reach the door-step.
+
+"He went out early, but I think he's back now. Come in, come in, all of
+you. I'm glad to see you--so will he be."
+
+Marie was cook, housemaid, valet, mother, doctor, and any number of
+things beside to Knight; just as in the village across the stream where
+she lived--or rather slept o' nights--she was billposter, bell-ringer,
+and town crier, to say nothing of her being the mother of eleven
+children, all her own--Knight being the adopted twelfth.
+
+"The mill might as well be without water as without Marie," said the
+Sculptor. "Wait until you taste her baked trout--the chef at the Voisin
+is a fool beside her." We had all shaken the dear woman's hand how
+and had preceded her into the square hall filled with easels, fresh
+canvases, paintings hung on hooks to dry, pots of brushes, rain coats,
+sample racks of hats, and the like.
+
+All this time the beast outside was snorting like a race-horse catching
+its breath after a run, the demon walking in front of it, examining its
+teeth, or mouth, or eyes, or whatever you do examine when you go poking
+around in front of it.
+
+Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom--evidently
+Knight's--full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels
+lining the walls; and then into another--evidently the guest's room--all
+lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old
+portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn,
+grumbling, "Just like him to try and fool us," but no trace of Knight.
+
+Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus
+bringing clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of
+willows shading the rushing stream below.
+
+"Louis! _Louis!_ Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?"
+
+There came an halloo--faint--downstream.
+
+"The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get
+him out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!"
+
+There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an
+uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself
+barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a
+crowded bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta,
+where I used the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when
+years ago, I clung to the platform of an elevated station in an effort
+to get, between the legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines
+of the spider-web connecting the two cities. I have watched, too,
+other painters in equally uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door
+painters; not steam-heated, easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda
+or photos to copy from) but it was the first time in all my varied
+experiences that I had ever come upon a painter standing up to his
+armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other kind of stream, the water
+breaking against his body as a rock breasts a torrent, and he working
+away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder high enough to scale
+the mill's roof.
+
+"Any fish?" yelled the Man from the Quarter.
+
+"Yes, one squirming around my knees now--shipped him a minute ago--foot
+slipped. Awful glad to see you--stay where you are till I get this high
+light."
+
+"Stay where I am!" bellowed the Sculptor. "Do you think I'm St. Peter or
+some long-legged crane that--"
+
+"All right--I'm coming."
+
+He had grabbed both sides of the ladder by this time, and with head in
+the _crotch_ was sloshing ashore, the water squirting from the tops of
+his boots.
+
+"Shake! Mighty good of you fellows to come all the way down to see me.
+Here, you stone-cutter--help me off with these boots. Marie's getting
+luncheon. Don't touch that canvas--all this morning's work--got to work
+early." (It looked to be a finished picture to me.)
+
+He was flat on the grass now, his legs in the air like an acrobat about
+to balance a globe, the water pouring from his wading boots, soaking the
+rest of him, all three of us tugging away--I at his head, the Sculptor
+at his feet. How Marie ever helped him squirm out of this diving-suit
+was more than I could tell.
+
+We had started for the mill now, the Man from the Quarter lugging the
+boots, still hoping there might be some truth in the trout story, the
+Sculptor with the palette (big as a tea-tray), Knight with the ladder,
+and I with the wet canvas.
+
+Again the cry rang out: "Marie! _Marie!_" and again the old woman
+started on a run--for the kitchen this time (she had been listening
+for this halloo--he generally came in wringing wet)--reappearing as we
+reached the hall door, her apron full of clothes swept from a drying
+line stretched before the big, all-embracing fireplace. These she
+carried ahead of us upstairs and deposited on the small iron bedstead
+in the painter's own room, Knight close behind, his wet socks making
+Man-Friday footprints in the middle of each well-scrubbed step. Once
+there, Knight dodged into a closet, wriggled himself loose, and was out
+again with half of Marie's apronful covering his chest and legs.
+
+It was easy to see where the power of his brush lay. No timid,
+uncertain, niggling stroke ever came from that torso or forearm or
+thigh. He hewed with a broad axe, not with a chisel, and he hewed
+true--that was the joy of it. The men of Meissonier's time, like the old
+Dutchmen, worked from their knuckle joints. These new painters, in their
+new technique--new to some--old really, as that of Velasquez and Frans
+Hals--swing their brushes from their spinal columns down their forearms
+(Knight's biceps measure seventeen inches) and out through their
+finger-tips, with something of the rhythm and force of an old-time
+blacksmith welding a tire. Broad chests, big boilers, strong arms,
+straight legs, and stiff backbones have much to do with success in
+life--more than we give them credit for. Instead of measuring men's
+heads, it would be just as well, once in a while, to slip the tape
+around their chests and waists. Steam is what makes the wheels go
+round, and steam is well-digested fuel and a place to put it. With
+this equipment a man can put "GO" into his business, strength into
+his literature, virility into his brush; without it he may succeed in
+selling spool cotton or bobbins, may write pink poems for the multitude
+and cover wooden panels with cardinals and ladies of high degree; in
+real satin and life-like lace, but no part of his output will take a
+full man's breath away.
+
+*****
+
+Sunshine, flowers, open windows letting in the cool breezes from meadow
+and stream; an old beamed ceiling, smoke-browned by countless pipes;
+walls covered with sketches of every nook and corner about us; a table
+for four, heaped with melons, grapes, cheese, and flanked by ten-pin
+bottles just out of the brook; good-fellowship, harmony of ideas,
+courage of convictions--with no heads swelled to an unnatural size; four
+appetites--enormous, prodigious appetites; Knight for host and Marie as
+high chamberlainess, make the feast of Lucullus and the afternoon teas
+of Cleopatra but so many quick lunches served in the rush hour of a
+downtown restaurant! Not only were the trout-baked-in cream (Marie's
+specialty) all that the Sculptor had claimed for them, but the
+fried chicken, souffles--everything, in fact, that the dear woman
+served--would have gained a Blue Ribbon had she filled the plate of any
+committeeman making the award.
+
+With the coffee and cigars (cigarettes had been smoked with every
+course--it was that kind of a feast) the four mouths had a breathing
+spell.
+
+Up to this time the talk had been a staccato performance between
+mouthfuls:
+
+"Yes--came near smashing a donkey--don't care if I do--no--no gravy"
+(Sculptor). "Let me put an extra bubble in your glass" (Knight). "These
+fish are as firm as the Adirondack trout" (Man from the Quarter). "More
+cream--thank you. Marie!" (Knight, of course) "more butter." "Donkey
+wasn't the only thing we missed--grazed a baby carriage and--" (Scribe).
+"I'm going to try a red ibis after luncheon and a miller for a tail
+fly--pass the melon" (Man from the Quarter): That sort of hurried talk
+without logical beginning or ending.
+
+But now each man had a comfortable chair, and filled it with shoulders
+hidden deep in its capacious depths, and legs straight out, only the
+arms and hands free enough to be within reach of the match-safe and
+thimble glasses. And with the ease and comfort of it all the talk itself
+slowed down to a pace more in harmony with that peace which passeth all
+understanding--unless you've a seat at the table.
+
+The several masters of the outdoor school were now called up, their
+merits discussed and their failings hammered: Thaulow, Sorolla y
+Bastida, the new Spanish wonder, whose exhibition the month before
+had astonished and delighted Paris: the Glasgow school; Zorn, Sargent,
+Winslow Homer--all the men of the direct, forceful school, men who
+swing their brushes from their spines instead of their finger-tips--were
+slashed into and made mincemeat of or extolled to the skies. Then
+the "patty-pats," with their little dabs of yellow, blue, and red,
+in imitation of the master Monet; the "slick and slimies," and the
+"woollies"--the men who essayed the vague, mysterious, and obscure--were
+set up and knocked down one after the other, as is the custom with all
+groups of painters the world over when the never-ending question of
+technique is tossed into the middle of the arena.
+
+Outdoor work next came into review and the discomforts and hardships
+a painter must go through to get what he is after, the Man from the
+Quarter defending the sit-by-the-fire fellows.
+
+"No use making a submarine diver of yourself, Knight," he growled.
+"Go and look at it and then come home and paint the impression and put
+something of yourself into it."
+
+Knight threw his head back and laughed. "I'd rather put the brook
+in--all of it."
+
+"But I don't see why you've got to get soaked to the skin every time you
+want to make a sketch."
+
+"The soaking is what helps," replied Knight, reaching for a match. "I
+like to feel I'm drink-some of it in. Then, when you're right in the
+middle of it you don't put on any airs and try to improve on what's
+before you and spoil it with detail. One dimple on a girl's cheek is
+charming; two--and you send for the doctor. And she's so simple when you
+look into her face--I'm talking of the brook now, not the girl--and it's
+so easy to put her down as she is, not the form and color only, but the
+_mood_ in which you find her. A brook is worse, really, than your best
+girl in the lightning changes she can go through--laughing, crying,
+coquetting--just as the mood seizes her. There, for instance,
+hanging over your head is a 'gray day"'--and he pointed to one of his
+running-water sketches tacked to the wall. "I tried to cheer her up a
+little with touches of warm tones here and there--all lies--same kind
+you tell your own chickabiddy when she's blue--but she wouldn't have it
+and cried straight ahead for four hours until the sun came out; but I
+was through by that time and waded ashore. You can see for yourselves
+how unhappy she was." He spoke as if the sketch was alive--and it was.
+
+"But I always work out of doors that way," he continued. "In winter up
+in Holland I sit in furs and wooden shoes, and often have to put alcohol
+in my water-cups to keep my colors from freezing. My big picture of 'The
+Torrent'--the one in the Toledo Art Gallery--was painted in January, and
+out of doors. As for the brushwork, I try to do the best I can. I used
+to tickle up things I painted; some of the fellows at Julian's believed
+in that, and so did Fleury and Lefebvre to some extent."
+
+"And when did you get over it?" I asked.
+
+"When my father persuaded me to send a bold sketch to the Volney Club,
+which I had done to please myself, and which they hung and bought. So I
+said to myself: 'Why trim, clean up, and make pretty a picture, when by
+simply painting what I love in nature in a free, breezy manner while my
+enthusiasm lasts--and it generally lasts until I get through;--sometimes
+it spills over to the next day--I please myself and a lot of people
+beside."
+
+We were all on our feet now examining the sketches--all running-brook
+studies--most of them made in that same pair of high-water boots. No one
+but the late Fritz Thaulow approaches him in giving the reality of this
+most difficult subject for an outdoor painter. The ocean surf repeats
+itself in its recurl and swash and by close watching a painter has often
+a chance to use his "second barrel," so to speak, but the upturned
+face of an unruly brook-is not only million-tinted and endless in its
+expression, but so sensitive in its reflections that every passing cloud
+and patch of blue above it saddens or cheers it.
+
+"Yes, painting water is enough to drive you mad," burst out Knight, "but
+I don't intend to paint anything else--not for years, any way. Hired the
+mill so I could paint the water running _away_ from you downhill. That's
+going to take a good many years to get hold of, but I'm going to stick
+it out. I can't always paint it from the banks, not if I want to study
+the middle ripples at my feet, and these are the ones that run out of
+your canvas just above your name-plate. _Got_ to stand in it, I tell
+you. Then you get the drawing, and the drawing is what counts. Oh, I
+love it!" Knight stretched his big arms and legs and sprang from his
+chair.
+
+"Really, fellows, I don't know anything about it. All I do is to let
+myself go. I always _feel_ more than I _see_, and so my brush has a
+devil of a job to keep up. Marie! _Marie!_"
+
+Had the good woman been a mile down the brook she could have heard
+him--she was only in the next room. "Bring in the boots--two pairs this
+time--we're going fishing. And, Marie--has the chauffeur had anything to
+eat?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Anything to drink?"
+
+"No, monsieur."
+
+"_What!_ Hand him this," and he grabbed a half-empty bottle from the
+table.
+
+I sprang forward and caught it before Marie got her fingers around it.
+
+"Not if I know it!" I cried. "We've got to get back to Dives. When he
+lands me inside my garden at the inn he shall have a magnum, but not a
+drop till he does."
+
+*****
+
+When the two had gone the Sculptor and I leaned back in our chairs and
+lighted fresh cigars. My enthusiasm has not cooled for the sports of
+my youth. With a comfortable stool, a well-filled basket, and a long
+jointed rod, I, like many another staid old painter, can still get
+an amazing amount of enjoyment watching a floating cork, but I
+didn't propose to follow those two lunatics. I knew the Man from the
+Quarter--had known him from the day of his birth--and knew what he would
+do and where he would go (over his head sometimes) for a poor devil of a
+fish half as long as his finger, and I had had positive evidence of
+what the other web-footed duck thought of ice-cold water. No, I'd take a
+little sugar in mine, if you please, and put a drop of--but the Sculptor
+had already foreseen and was then forestalling my needs, so we leaned
+back in our chairs once more.
+
+Again the talk covered wide reaches.
+
+"Great boy, Knight," broke out the Sculptor in a sudden burst of
+enthusiasm over his friend. "You ought to see him handle a crowd when
+he's at work. He knows the French people--never gets mad. He bought a
+calf for Marie last week, and drove it home himself. Told me it had ten
+legs, four heads, and twenty tails before he got it here. Old woman lost
+hers and Knight bought her another--he'd bring her a herd if she wanted
+it. All the way from the market the boys kept up a running fire of
+criticism. When the ringleader came too near, Knight sprang at him with
+a yelp like a dog's. The boy was so taken aback that he ran. Then
+Knight roared with laughter, and in an instant the whole crowd were his
+friends--two of them helped him get the calf out of town. When a French
+crowd laughs with you you can do anything with them. He had had more fun
+bringing home that calf, he told me, than he'd had for weeks, and he's a
+wonder at having a good time."
+
+Then followed--much of which was news to me--an account of the painter's
+earlier life and successes.
+
+He was born in Paris, August 3, 1873; his father, Ridgway Knight, the
+distinguished painter, and his mother, who was Rebecca Morris Webster,
+both being Philadelphians. Not only is he, therefore, of true American
+descent, but his eight great-grandparents were Americans, dating back
+to Thomas Ridgway, who was born in Delaware in 1713. Thus by both the
+French and American laws he is an American citizen.
+
+At fourteen he was sent to Chigwell School in England by his father,
+to have "art knocked out of him" by the uncongenial surroundings of the
+quiet old school where the great William Penn had been taught to read
+and write. He left in 1890, having won the Special Classical Prize,
+Oxford and Cambridge certificate Prize, besides prizes for carpentering,
+gymnasium, running, and "putting the weight."
+
+At home the boy always drew and painted for pleasure, as well as at
+school during the half-holidays. Some water-colors made during a holiday
+trip in Brittany in 1890 decided his father to allow him to follow art
+as a career. He entered Julian's studio, with Jules Lefebvre and Tony
+Robert-Fleury as professors in 1891, and studied from the nude during
+the five following winters. His principal work was, however, done in the
+country at and around Poissy, under the guidance of his father.
+
+His exhibits in the Paris Salon (_artistes Francais_) were twenty-four
+oils and water-colors from 1894 to 1906, obtaining an honorable mention
+in 1901 with the "Thames at Whitchurch"; a gold medal, third class, in
+1905, with "The Torrent"; and a gold medal, second class, in 1906, with
+his triptych "The Giant Cities" (New York, Paris, London), which makes
+him _hors concours_, with the great distinction of being the first
+American landscape painter to get two Salon gold medals in two
+consecutive years. He won also a bronze medal in the American section
+of the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 with a water-color, and a gold
+medal of honor at Rheims, Cherbourg, Geneva, and Nantes.
+
+His most important pictures are: "The Torrent," 4 1/2 x 6 feet, owned by
+the Toledo Art Gallery; "The Abandoned Mill," 4 1/2 x 6 feet; "The
+End of the Island," 6 x 8 feet; "Clisson Castle," 3 x 4 1/2 feet, a
+water-color; "After the Storm," 3 x 5 feet; and "Winter in Holland," 3x4
+feet.
+
+I had listened to the Sculptor's brief account of his friend's progress
+with calm attention, but it had not altered my opinion of the man or
+his genius. None of it really interested me except that somebody beside
+myself had found out the lad's qualities--for to me he is still a lad.
+None of the jury who made the awards ever looked below the paint--that
+is, if they were like other juries the world over. They saw the
+brush-mark, no doubt, but they missed the breeze that came with it--was
+its life, really--a breeze that swept through and out of him, blowing
+side by side with genius and good health--a wind of destiny, perhaps,
+that will carry him to climes that other men know not of.
+
+But what a refreshing thing, this breeze, to come out of a man, and what
+a refreshing kind of a man for it to come out of! No pose, no effort
+to fill a No. 8 hat with a No. 7 head; just a simple, conscientious,
+hard-working young painter, humble-minded in the presence of his
+goddess, and full to overflowing with an uncontrollable spontaneity.
+This in itself was worth risking one's neck to see.
+
+Again the cry rang out, "Marie!" and two half-drowned water-rats stepped
+in; the Man from the Quarter in his underpinning--his pair of boots
+leaked and he had stripped them off--and Knight with his own half
+full of water. Both roared with laughter at Marie tugging at the huge
+white-rubber boots, the floor she had scrubbed so conscientiously
+spattered with sand and water.
+
+Then began the customary recriminations: "Hadn't been for you I wouldn't
+have lost him!" "What had I to do with it?" etc., etc.--the same old
+story when neither gets a bite.
+
+That night, bumping over the thank-you-marms, flashing through darkened
+villages, and scooting in a dead heat along ribboned roads ghostly
+white in the starlight, on the way back to my garden--and we did arrive
+safely, and the chauffeur had his magnum (that is, his share of it)--I
+could not help saying to myself:
+
+"Yes, it's good to be young and bouyant, but it's better to be one's
+self."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man In The High-Water Boots, by
+F. Hopkinson Smith
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+eBook #23701 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23701)
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Man in the High-water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The Man In The High-Water Boots, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Man In The High-Water Boots
+       1909
+
+Author: F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23701]
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By F. Hopkinson Smith <br /><br /> 1909
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the
+      kind of charm that makes you glad when he comes and sorry when he goes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Experience and Pluck.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These I knew and <i>loved</i>; even now the cockles of my heart warm up
+      when I think of them. Others I knew and <i>liked</i>; the difference being
+      simply one of personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time it is a painter who crosses my path&mdash;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 &ldquo;blew in&rdquo; (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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a long, low,
+      double-jointed crouching tiger&mdash;a forty-devil-power machine, fearing
+      neither God nor man, and which is bound sooner or later to come to an
+      untimely end and the scrap heap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All about, fringing the tea tables and filling the summer air with their
+      chatter and laughter, were gathered not only the cream, but the very top
+      skimmings of all the fashion and folly of Trouville&mdash;twenty minutes
+      away, automobile time&mdash;their blossoming hats, full-blown parasols,
+      and pink and white veils adding another flower-bed to the quaint old
+      courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the return of the Man from the Latin Quarter, his other guest, who
+      knew the ins and outs of the cellar, and who had gone in search of a
+      certain vintage known only to the initiated (don't forget to ask for it
+      when you go&mdash;it has no label, but the cork is sealed with yellow wax;
+      M. Ramois, the good landlord, will know the kind&mdash;<i>if he thinks you
+      do</i>), our host, the Sculptor, his mind still on his friend the painter,
+      looked up and said, as he reached for the corkscrew:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not go to-morrow? The mill is the most picturesque thing you ever saw&mdash;an
+      old Louis XIII house and mill on the River Rille near Beaumont-le-Roger,
+      once inhabited by the poet Chateaubriand. The river runs underground in
+      the sands for some distance and comes out a few miles from Knight's&mdash;cold
+      as ice and clear as crystal and packed full of trout. Besides Knight is at
+      home&mdash;had a line from him this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Man from the Quarter laid down his glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How far is it?&rdquo; This man is so daft on fishing that he has been known to
+      kiss the first trout he hooks in the spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only fifty-six miles, my dear boy&mdash;run you over in an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And everything else that gets in the way,&rdquo; said the Man from the Quarter,
+      moving his glass nearer the Sculptor's elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No danger of that&mdash;I've got a siren that you can hear for a mile&mdash;but
+      really, it's only a step.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      I once slid down a salt mine on a pair of summer pantaloons and brought up
+      in total darkness (a godsend under the circumstances). I still shudder
+      when I think of the speed; of the way my hair tried to leave my scalp; of
+      the peculiar blink in my eyes; of the hours it took to live through forty
+      seconds; and of my final halt in the middle of a moon-faced,
+      round-paunched German who was paid a mark for saving the bones and necks
+      of idiots like myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time the sliding was done in an overcoat (although the summer sun was
+      blazing), a steamer cap, and a pair of goggles. First there came a shivery
+      chuggetty-chug, as if the beast was shaking himself loose. Next a noise
+      like the opening of a bolt in an iron cage, and then the Inn of William
+      the Conqueror&mdash;the village-beach, inlet&mdash;wide sea, streamed
+      behind like a panorama run at high pressure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first swoop was along the sea, a whirl into Houlgate, a mad dash
+      through the village, dogs and chickens running for dear life, and out
+      again with the deadly rush of a belated wild goose hurrying to a southern
+      clime. Our host sat beside the chauffeur, who looked like the demon in a
+      ballet in his goggles and skull-cap. The Man from the Quarter and I
+      crouched on the rear seats, our eyes on the turn of the road ahead. What
+      we had left behind, or what might be on either side of us was of no
+      moment; what would come around that far-distant curve a mile away and a
+      minute off was what troubled us. The demon and the Sculptor were as cool
+      as the captain and first mate on the bridge of a liner in a gale; the Man
+      from the Quarter stared doggedly ahead; I was too scared for scenery and
+      too proud to ask the Sculptor to slow down, so I thought of my sins and
+      slowly murmured, &ldquo;Now I lay me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When we got to the top of the last hill and had swirled into the straight
+      broad turnpike leading to Lisieux, the Sculptor spoke in an undertone to
+      the demon, did something with his foot or hand or teeth&mdash;everything
+      with which he could push, pull, or bite was busy&mdash;and the machine, as
+      if struck by a lash, sprang into space. Trees, fences, little farmhouses,
+      hay-stacks, canvas-covered wagons, frightened children, dogs, now went by
+      in blurred outlines; ten miles, thirty miles, then a string of villages,
+      Liseau among them, the siren shrieking like a lost soul sinking into
+      perdition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Watch the road to the right,&rdquo; wheezed the Sculptor between his breaths;
+      &ldquo;that is where the Egyptian prince was killed&mdash;&rdquo; this over his
+      shoulder to me&mdash;&ldquo;a tram-car hit him&mdash;you can see the hole in the
+      bank. Made that last mile in sixty-five seconds&mdash;running fifty-nine
+      now&mdash;look out for that cross-road&mdash;'Wow-wow-oo&mdash;wow-wow'&rdquo;
+       (siren). &ldquo;Damn that market cart&mdash;'Wow-wow-o-o-wow.'&rdquo; &ldquo;Slow up, or
+      we'll be on top of that donkey&mdash;just grazed it. Can't tell what a
+      donkey will do when a girl's driving it.&rdquo; 'Wow-oo-w-o&mdash;.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up a long hill now, down into a valley&mdash;the road like a piece of
+      white tape stretching ahead&mdash;past school-houses, barns, market
+      gardens; into dense woods, out on to level plains bare of a tree&mdash;one
+      mad, devilish, brutal rush, with every man's eyes glued to the turn of the
+      road ahead, which every half minute swerved, straightened, swerved again;
+      now blocked by trees, now opening out, only to close, twist, and squirm
+      anew. Great fun this, gambling with death, knowing that from behind any
+      bush, beyond every hill crest, and around each curve there may spring
+      something that will make assorted junk of your machine and send you to
+      Ballyhack!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one more hill,&rdquo; breathed the Sculptor, wiping the caked dust from
+      his lips. Woo-oo-wow-o-o (nurse with a baby-carriage this time, running
+      into the bushes like a frightened rabbit). &ldquo;See the mill stream&mdash;that's
+      it flashing in the sunlight! See the roof of the mill? That's Aston
+      Knight's! Down brakes! All out&mdash;fifty-six miles in one hour and
+      twenty-two minutes! Not bad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang out&mdash;so did the Man from the Quarter&mdash;the flash from
+      the mill stream glistening in the sunlight had set his blood to tingling;
+      as for myself, no sheltering doorway had ever looked so inviting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie! <i>Marie!</i> Where's monsieur?&rdquo; cried out the Sculptor from his
+      seat beside the demon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up-stairs, I think,&rdquo; answered a stout, gray-haired, rosy-cheeked woman,
+      wiping her hand and arms on her apron as she spoke. She had started on a
+      run from the brook's edge behind the house, where she had been washing,
+      when she heard the shriek of the siren, but the machine had pulled up
+      before she could reach the door-step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He went out early, but I think he's back now. Come in, come in, all of
+      you. I'm glad to see you&mdash;so will he be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Marie was cook, housemaid, valet, mother, doctor, and any number of things
+      beside to Knight; just as in the village across the stream where she lived&mdash;or
+      rather slept o' nights&mdash;she was billposter, bell-ringer, and town
+      crier, to say nothing of her being the mother of eleven children, all her
+      own&mdash;Knight being the adopted twelfth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mill might as well be without water as without Marie,&rdquo; said the
+      Sculptor. &ldquo;Wait until you taste her baked trout&mdash;the chef at the
+      Voisin is a fool beside her.&rdquo; We had all shaken the dear woman's hand how
+      and had preceded her into the square hall filled with easels, fresh
+      canvases, paintings hung on hooks to dry, pots of brushes, rain coats,
+      sample racks of hats, and the like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time the beast outside was snorting like a race-horse catching
+      its breath after a run, the demon walking in front of it, examining its
+      teeth, or mouth, or eyes, or whatever you do examine when you go poking
+      around in front of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom&mdash;evidently
+      Knight's&mdash;full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels
+      lining the walls; and then into another&mdash;evidently the guest's room&mdash;all
+      lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old
+      portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn,
+      grumbling, &ldquo;Just like him to try and fool us,&rdquo; but no trace of Knight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus bringing
+      clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of willows
+      shading the rushing stream below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Louis! <i>Louis!</i> Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There came an halloo&mdash;faint&mdash;downstream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get him
+      out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an
+      uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself
+      barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a crowded
+      bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta, where I used
+      the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when years ago, I clung
+      to the platform of an elevated station in an effort to get, between the
+      legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines of the spider-web
+      connecting the two cities. I have watched, too, other painters in equally
+      uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door painters; not steam-heated,
+      easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda or photos to copy from) but it
+      was the first time in all my varied experiences that I had ever come upon
+      a painter standing up to his armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other
+      kind of stream, the water breaking against his body as a rock breasts a
+      torrent, and he working away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder
+      high enough to scale the mill's roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fish?&rdquo; yelled the Man from the Quarter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, one squirming around my knees now&mdash;shipped him a minute ago&mdash;foot
+      slipped. Awful glad to see you&mdash;stay where you are till I get this
+      high light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay where I am!&rdquo; bellowed the Sculptor. &ldquo;Do you think I'm St. Peter or
+      some long-legged crane that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right&mdash;I'm coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had grabbed both sides of the ladder by this time, and with head in the
+      <i>crotch</i> was sloshing ashore, the water squirting from the tops of
+      his boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shake! Mighty good of you fellows to come all the way down to see me.
+      Here, you stone-cutter&mdash;help me off with these boots. Marie's getting
+      luncheon. Don't touch that canvas&mdash;all this morning's work&mdash;got
+      to work early.&rdquo; (It looked to be a finished picture to me.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was flat on the grass now, his legs in the air like an acrobat about to
+      balance a globe, the water pouring from his wading boots, soaking the rest
+      of him, all three of us tugging away&mdash;I at his head, the Sculptor at
+      his feet. How Marie ever helped him squirm out of this diving-suit was
+      more than I could tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had started for the mill now, the Man from the Quarter lugging the
+      boots, still hoping there might be some truth in the trout story, the
+      Sculptor with the palette (big as a tea-tray), Knight with the ladder, and
+      I with the wet canvas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the cry rang out: &ldquo;Marie! <i>Marie!</i>&rdquo; and again the old woman
+      started on a run&mdash;for the kitchen this time (she had been listening
+      for this halloo&mdash;he generally came in wringing wet)&mdash;reappearing
+      as we reached the hall door, her apron full of clothes swept from a drying
+      line stretched before the big, all-embracing fireplace. These she carried
+      ahead of us upstairs and deposited on the small iron bedstead in the
+      painter's own room, Knight close behind, his wet socks making Man-Friday
+      footprints in the middle of each well-scrubbed step. Once there, Knight
+      dodged into a closet, wriggled himself loose, and was out again with half
+      of Marie's apronful covering his chest and legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was easy to see where the power of his brush lay. No timid, uncertain,
+      niggling stroke ever came from that torso or forearm or thigh. He hewed
+      with a broad axe, not with a chisel, and he hewed true&mdash;that was the
+      joy of it. The men of Meissonier's time, like the old Dutchmen, worked
+      from their knuckle joints. These new painters, in their new technique&mdash;new
+      to some&mdash;old really, as that of Velasquez and Frans Hals&mdash;swing
+      their brushes from their spinal columns down their forearms (Knight's
+      biceps measure seventeen inches) and out through their finger-tips, with
+      something of the rhythm and force of an old-time blacksmith welding a
+      tire. Broad chests, big boilers, strong arms, straight legs, and stiff
+      backbones have much to do with success in life&mdash;more than we give
+      them credit for. Instead of measuring men's heads, it would be just as
+      well, once in a while, to slip the tape around their chests and waists.
+      Steam is what makes the wheels go round, and steam is well-digested fuel
+      and a place to put it. With this equipment a man can put &ldquo;GO&rdquo; into his
+      business, strength into his literature, virility into his brush; without
+      it he may succeed in selling spool cotton or bobbins, may write pink poems
+      for the multitude and cover wooden panels with cardinals and ladies of
+      high degree; in real satin and life-like lace, but no part of his output
+      will take a full man's breath away.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      Sunshine, flowers, open windows letting in the cool breezes from meadow
+      and stream; an old beamed ceiling, smoke-browned by countless pipes; walls
+      covered with sketches of every nook and corner about us; a table for four,
+      heaped with melons, grapes, cheese, and flanked by ten-pin bottles just
+      out of the brook; good-fellowship, harmony of ideas, courage of
+      convictions&mdash;with no heads swelled to an unnatural size; four
+      appetites&mdash;enormous, prodigious appetites; Knight for host and Marie
+      as high chamberlainess, make the feast of Lucullus and the afternoon teas
+      of Cleopatra but so many quick lunches served in the rush hour of a
+      downtown restaurant! Not only were the trout-baked-in cream (Marie's
+      specialty) all that the Sculptor had claimed for them, but the fried
+      chicken, soufflés&mdash;everything, in fact, that the dear woman served&mdash;would
+      have gained a Blue Ribbon had she filled the plate of any committeeman
+      making the award.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coffee and cigars (cigarettes had been smoked with every course&mdash;it
+      was that kind of a feast) the four mouths had a breathing spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up to this time the talk had been a staccato performance between
+      mouthfuls:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;came near smashing a donkey&mdash;don't care if I do&mdash;no&mdash;no
+      gravy&rdquo; (Sculptor). &ldquo;Let me put an extra bubble in your glass&rdquo; (Knight).
+      &ldquo;These fish are as firm as the Adirondack trout&rdquo; (Man from the Quarter).
+      &ldquo;More cream&mdash;thank you. Marie!&rdquo; (Knight, of course) &ldquo;more butter.&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Donkey wasn't the only thing we missed&mdash;grazed a baby carriage and&mdash;&rdquo;
+       (Scribe). &ldquo;I'm going to try a red ibis after luncheon and a miller for a
+      tail fly&mdash;pass the melon&rdquo; (Man from the Quarter): That sort of
+      hurried talk without logical beginning or ending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now each man had a comfortable chair, and filled it with shoulders
+      hidden deep in its capacious depths, and legs straight out, only the arms
+      and hands free enough to be within reach of the match-safe and thimble
+      glasses. And with the ease and comfort of it all the talk itself slowed
+      down to a pace more in harmony with that peace which passeth all
+      understanding&mdash;unless you've a seat at the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The several masters of the outdoor school were now called up, their merits
+      discussed and their failings hammered: Thaulow, Sorolla y Bastida, the new
+      Spanish wonder, whose exhibition the month before had astonished and
+      delighted Paris: the Glasgow school; Zorn, Sargent, Winslow Homer&mdash;all
+      the men of the direct, forceful school, men who swing their brushes from
+      their spines instead of their finger-tips&mdash;were slashed into and made
+      mincemeat of or extolled to the skies. Then the &ldquo;patty-pats,&rdquo; with their
+      little dabs of yellow, blue, and red, in imitation of the master Monet;
+      the &ldquo;slick and slimies,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;woollies&rdquo;&mdash;the men who essayed the
+      vague, mysterious, and obscure&mdash;were set up and knocked down one
+      after the other, as is the custom with all groups of painters the world
+      over when the never-ending question of technique is tossed into the middle
+      of the arena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outdoor work next came into review and the discomforts and hardships a
+      painter must go through to get what he is after, the Man from the Quarter
+      defending the sit-by-the-fire fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No use making a submarine diver of yourself, Knight,&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;Go and
+      look at it and then come home and paint the impression and put something
+      of yourself into it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Knight threw his head back and laughed. &ldquo;I'd rather put the brook in&mdash;all
+      of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't see why you've got to get soaked to the skin every time you
+      want to make a sketch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The soaking is what helps,&rdquo; replied Knight, reaching for a match. &ldquo;I like
+      to feel I'm drink-some of it in. Then, when you're right in the middle of
+      it you don't put on any airs and try to improve on what's before you and
+      spoil it with detail. One dimple on a girl's cheek is charming; two&mdash;and
+      you send for the doctor. And she's so simple when you look into her face&mdash;I'm
+      talking of the brook now, not the girl&mdash;and it's so easy to put her
+      down as she is, not the form and color only, but the <i>mood</i> in which
+      you find her. A brook is worse, really, than your best girl in the
+      lightning changes she can go through&mdash;laughing, crying, coquetting&mdash;just
+      as the mood seizes her. There, for instance, hanging over your head is a
+      'gray day&rdquo;'&mdash;and he pointed to one of his running-water sketches
+      tacked to the wall. &ldquo;I tried to cheer her up a little with touches of warm
+      tones here and there&mdash;all lies&mdash;same kind you tell your own
+      chickabiddy when she's blue&mdash;but she wouldn't have it and cried
+      straight ahead for four hours until the sun came out; but I was through by
+      that time and waded ashore. You can see for yourselves how unhappy she
+      was.&rdquo; He spoke as if the sketch was alive&mdash;and it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I always work out of doors that way,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;In winter up in
+      Holland I sit in furs and wooden shoes, and often have to put alcohol in
+      my water-cups to keep my colors from freezing. My big picture of 'The
+      Torrent'&mdash;the one in the Toledo Art Gallery&mdash;was painted in
+      January, and out of doors. As for the brushwork, I try to do the best I
+      can. I used to tickle up things I painted; some of the fellows at Julian's
+      believed in that, and so did Fleury and Lefebvre to some extent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when did you get over it?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When my father persuaded me to send a bold sketch to the Volney Club,
+      which I had done to please myself, and which they hung and bought. So I
+      said to myself: 'Why trim, clean up, and make pretty a picture, when by
+      simply painting what I love in nature in a free, breezy manner while my
+      enthusiasm lasts&mdash;and it generally lasts until I get through;&mdash;sometimes
+      it spills over to the next day&mdash;I please myself and a lot of people
+      beside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were all on our feet now examining the sketches&mdash;all running-brook
+      studies&mdash;most of them made in that same pair of high-water boots. No
+      one but the late Fritz Thaulow approaches him in giving the reality of
+      this most difficult subject for an outdoor painter. The ocean surf repeats
+      itself in its recurl and swash and by close watching a painter has often a
+      chance to use his &ldquo;second barrel,&rdquo; so to speak, but the upturned face of
+      an unruly brook-is not only million-tinted and endless in its expression,
+      but so sensitive in its reflections that every passing cloud and patch of
+      blue above it saddens or cheers it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, painting water is enough to drive you mad,&rdquo; burst out Knight, &ldquo;but I
+      don't intend to paint anything else&mdash;not for years, any way. Hired
+      the mill so I could paint the water running <i>away</i> from you downhill.
+      That's going to take a good many years to get hold of, but I'm going to
+      stick it out. I can't always paint it from the banks, not if I want to
+      study the middle ripples at my feet, and these are the ones that run out
+      of your canvas just above your name-plate. <i>Got</i> to stand in it, I
+      tell you. Then you get the drawing, and the drawing is what counts. Oh, I
+      love it!&rdquo; Knight stretched his big arms and legs and sprang from his
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, fellows, I don't know anything about it. All I do is to let
+      myself go. I always <i>feel</i> more than I <i>see</i>, and so my brush
+      has a devil of a job to keep up. Marie! <i>Marie!</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the good woman been a mile down the brook she could have heard him&mdash;she
+      was only in the next room. &ldquo;Bring in the boots&mdash;two pairs this time&mdash;we're
+      going fishing. And, Marie&mdash;has the chauffeur had anything to eat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, monsieur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything to drink?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, monsieur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>What!</i> Hand him this,&rdquo; and he grabbed a half-empty bottle from the
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sprang forward and caught it before Marie got her fingers around it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if I know it!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;We've got to get back to Dives. When he
+      lands me inside my garden at the inn he shall have a magnum, but not a
+      drop till he does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      When the two had gone the Sculptor and I leaned back in our chairs and
+      lighted fresh cigars. My enthusiasm has not cooled for the sports of my
+      youth. With a comfortable stool, a well-filled basket, and a long jointed
+      rod, I, like many another staid old painter, can still get an amazing
+      amount of enjoyment watching a floating cork, but I didn't propose to
+      follow those two lunatics. I knew the Man from the Quarter&mdash;had known
+      him from the day of his birth&mdash;and knew what he would do and where he
+      would go (over his head sometimes) for a poor devil of a fish half as long
+      as his finger, and I had had positive evidence of what the other
+      web-footed duck thought of ice-cold water. No, I'd take a little sugar in
+      mine, if you please, and put a drop of&mdash;but the Sculptor had already
+      foreseen and was then forestalling my needs, so we leaned back in our
+      chairs once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the talk covered wide reaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great boy, Knight,&rdquo; broke out the Sculptor in a sudden burst of
+      enthusiasm over his friend. &ldquo;You ought to see him handle a crowd when he's
+      at work. He knows the French people&mdash;never gets mad. He bought a calf
+      for Marie last week, and drove it home himself. Told me it had ten legs,
+      four heads, and twenty tails before he got it here. Old woman lost hers
+      and Knight bought her another&mdash;he'd bring her a herd if she wanted
+      it. All the way from the market the boys kept up a running fire of
+      criticism. When the ringleader came too near, Knight sprang at him with a
+      yelp like a dog's. The boy was so taken aback that he ran. Then Knight
+      roared with laughter, and in an instant the whole crowd were his friends&mdash;two
+      of them helped him get the calf out of town. When a French crowd laughs
+      with you you can do anything with them. He had had more fun bringing home
+      that calf, he told me, than he'd had for weeks, and he's a wonder at
+      having a good time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then followed&mdash;much of which was news to me&mdash;an account of the
+      painter's earlier life and successes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was born in Paris, August 3, 1873; his father, Ridgway Knight, the
+      distinguished painter, and his mother, who was Rebecca Morris Webster,
+      both being Philadelphians. Not only is he, therefore, of true American
+      descent, but his eight great-grandparents were Americans, dating back to
+      Thomas Ridgway, who was born in Delaware in 1713. Thus by both the French
+      and American laws he is an American citizen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At fourteen he was sent to Chigwell School in England by his father, to
+      have &ldquo;art knocked out of him&rdquo; by the uncongenial surroundings of the quiet
+      old school where the great William Penn had been taught to read and write.
+      He left in 1890, having won the Special Classical Prize, Oxford and
+      Cambridge certificate Prize, besides prizes for carpentering, gymnasium,
+      running, and &ldquo;putting the weight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At home the boy always drew and painted for pleasure, as well as at school
+      during the half-holidays. Some water-colors made during a holiday trip in
+      Brittany in 1890 decided his father to allow him to follow art as a
+      career. He entered Julian's studio, with Jules Lefebvre and Tony
+      Robert-Fleury as professors in 1891, and studied from the nude during the
+      five following winters. His principal work was, however, done in the
+      country at and around Poissy, under the guidance of his father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His exhibits in the Paris Salon (<i>artistes Français</i>) were
+      twenty-four oils and water-colors from 1894 to 1906, obtaining an
+      honorable mention in 1901 with the &ldquo;Thames at Whitchurch&rdquo;; a gold medal,
+      third class, in 1905, with &ldquo;The Torrent&rdquo;; and a gold medal, second class,
+      in 1906, with his triptych &ldquo;The Giant Cities&rdquo; (New York, Paris, London),
+      which makes him <i>hors concours</i>, with the great distinction of being
+      the first American landscape painter to get two Salon gold medals in two
+      consecutive years. He won also a bronze medal in the American section of
+      the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 with a water-color, and a gold
+      medal of honor at Rheims, Cherbourg, Geneva, and Nantes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His most important pictures are: &ldquo;The Torrent,&rdquo; 4 1/2 x 6 feet, owned by
+      the Toledo Art Gallery; &ldquo;The Abandoned Mill,&rdquo; 4 1/2 x 6 feet; &ldquo;The End of
+      the Island,&rdquo; 6 x 8 feet; &ldquo;Clisson Castle,&rdquo; 3 x 4 1/2 feet, a water-color;
+      &ldquo;After the Storm,&rdquo; 3 x 5 feet; and &ldquo;Winter in Holland,&rdquo; 3x4 feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had listened to the Sculptor's brief account of his friend's progress
+      with calm attention, but it had not altered my opinion of the man or his
+      genius. None of it really interested me except that somebody beside myself
+      had found out the lad's qualities&mdash;for to me he is still a lad. None
+      of the jury who made the awards ever looked below the paint&mdash;that is,
+      if they were like other juries the world over. They saw the brush-mark, no
+      doubt, but they missed the breeze that came with it&mdash;was its life,
+      really&mdash;a breeze that swept through and out of him, blowing side by
+      side with genius and good health&mdash;a wind of destiny, perhaps, that
+      will carry him to climes that other men know not of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what a refreshing thing, this breeze, to come out of a man, and what a
+      refreshing kind of a man for it to come out of! No pose, no effort to fill
+      a No. 8 hat with a No. 7 head; just a simple, conscientious, hard-working
+      young painter, humble-minded in the presence of his goddess, and full to
+      overflowing with an uncontrollable spontaneity. This in itself was worth
+      risking one's neck to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the cry rang out, &ldquo;Marie!&rdquo; and two half-drowned water-rats stepped
+      in; the Man from the Quarter in his underpinning&mdash;his pair of boots
+      leaked and he had stripped them off&mdash;and Knight with his own half
+      full of water. Both roared with laughter at Marie tugging at the huge
+      white-rubber boots, the floor she had scrubbed so conscientiously
+      spattered with sand and water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then began the customary recriminations: &ldquo;Hadn't been for you I wouldn't
+      have lost him!&rdquo; &ldquo;What had I to do with it?&rdquo; etc., etc.&mdash;the same old
+      story when neither gets a bite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, bumping over the thank-you-marms, flashing through darkened
+      villages, and scooting in a dead heat along ribboned roads ghostly white
+      in the starlight, on the way back to my garden&mdash;and we did arrive
+      safely, and the chauffeur had his magnum (that is, his share of it)&mdash;I
+      could not help saying to myself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it's good to be young and bouyant, but it's better to be one's
+      self.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man In The High-Water Boots, by
+F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE HIGH-WATER BOOTS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 23701-h.htm or 23701-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/3/7/0/23701/
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
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+</pre>
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