penguins became the penguins of the continental year; they made penguins the fashionable bird in Paris, and also (twelve months later) in London.  The French Government offered to buy the picture on behalf of the Republic at its customary price of five hundred francs, but Priam Farll sold it to the American connoisseur Whitney C. Whitt for five thousand dollars.  Shortly afterwards he sold the policeman, whom he had kept by him, to the same connoisseur for ten thousand dollars.  Whitney C. Whitt was the expert who had paid two hundred thousand dollars for a Madonna and St. Joseph, with donor, of Raphael.  The enterprising journal before mentioned calculated that, counting the space actually occupied on the canvas by the policeman, the daring connoisseur had expended two guineas per square inch on the policeman.

At which stage the vast newspaper public suddenly woke up and demanded with one voice: 

“Who is this Priam Farll?”

Though the query remained unanswered, Priam Farll’s reputation was henceforward absolutely assured, and this in spite of the fact that he omitted to comply with the regulations ordained by English society for the conduct of successful painters.  He ought, first, to have taken the elementary precaution of being born in the United States.  He ought, after having refused all interviews for months, to have ultimately granted a special one to a newspaper with the largest circulation.  He ought to have returned to England, grown a mane and a tufted tail, and become the king of beasts; or at least to have made a speech at a banquet about the noble and purifying mission of art.  Assuredly he ought to have painted the portrait of his father or grandfather as an artisan, to prove that he was not a snob.  But no!  Not content with making each of his pictures utterly different from all the others, he neglected all the above formalities—­and yet managed to pile triumph on triumph.  There are some men of whom it may be said that, like a punter on a good day, they can’t do wrong.  Priam Farll was one such.  In a few years he had become a legend, a standing side-dish of a riddle.  No one knew him; no one saw him; no one married him.  Constantly abroad, he was ever the subject of conflicting rumours.  Parfitts themselves, his London agents, knew naught of him but his handwriting—­on the backs of cheques in four figures.  They sold an average of five large and five small pictures for him every year.  These pictures arrived out of the unknown and the cheques went into the unknown.

Young artists, mute in admiration before the masterpieces from his brush which enriched all the national galleries of Europe (save, of course, that in Trafalgar Square), dreamt of him, worshipped him, and quarrelled fiercely about him, as the very symbol of glory, luxury and flawless accomplishment, never conceiving him as a man like themselves, with boots to lace up, a palette to clean, a beating heart, and an instinctive fear of solitude.