That a portrait-painter’s lot is not always a happy one may be illustrated by the following extracts from letters of Morse to the Mrs. Ball whom he mentions in the foregoing letter to his mother, and who seems to have been a most capricious person, insisting on continual alterations, and one day pleased and the next almost insulting in her censure:—­

MADAM,—­Supposing that I was dealing not only with a woman of honor, but, from her professions, with a Christian, I ventured in my note of the 18th inst., to make an appeal to your conscience in support of the justness of my demand of the four hundred dollars still due from you for your portrait.  By your last note I find you are disposed to take an advantage of that circumstance of which I did not suppose you capable.  My sense of the justness of my demand was so strong, as will appear from the whole tenor of that note, that I venture this appeal, not imagining that any person of honor, of the least spark of generous feeling, and more especially of Christian principle, could understand anything more than the enforcing my claim by an appeal to that principle which I knew should be the strongest in a real Christian.

Whilst, however, you have chosen to put a different construction on this part of the note, and supposed that I left you to say whether you would pay me anything or nothing, you have (doubtless unconsciously) shown that your conscience has decided in favor of the whole amount which is my due, and which I can never voluntarily relinquish.

You affirm in the first part of your note that, after due consideration, you think the real value of the picture is four hundred dollars (without the frame), yet, had your crop been good, your conscience would have adjudged me the remaining four hundred dollars without hesitation; and again (if your crop should be good) you could pay me the four hundred dollars next season.

Must I understand from this, madam, that the goodness or badness of your crop is the scale on which your conscience measures your obligation to pay a just debt, and that it contracts or expands as your crop increases or diminishes?  Pardon me, madam, if I say that this appears to be the case from your letter.

My wish throughout this whole business has been to accommodate the time and terms of payment as much to your convenience as I could consistently with my duty to my family and myself.  As a proof of this you need only advert to my note of yesterday, in which I inform you that I am paying interest on money borrowed for the use of my family which your debt, if it had been promptly paid, would have prevented.

And in another letter he says:—­

“I completed your picture in the summer with two others which have given, as far as I can learn, entire satisfaction.  Yours was painted with the same attention and with the same ability as the others, and admired as a picture, after it was finished, as much by some as the others, and more by many.