From that moment I cared for neither praise nor blame.  The opinion of men affected me not at all.  My gift was mine, and I knew it.  I held it straight from the Divine hands.  I had the Divine promise with me for as long as I should live on this earth.

And I was filled with a boundless delight in life and my own powers.

When I showed my original pictures all painted under inspiration to my father, he carefully put on his pince-nez and studied them very closely.  After that he said he must reserve his judgment.  When they went to the Academy and were promptly refused, he drew a long face and said I had better have gone into the Indian Civil Service as he wished.  Subsequently, when I had sold them all, and not one for less than a thousand guineas, he began to enter upon a placid state of contentment with me which induced him to say to other captious relations—­“Let the boy alone, he will be an artist some day.”  At which I used to laugh inwardly and go away to my studio to listen to the Divine voice dictating fresh pictures to me.  For five years in Italy I had studied closely and worked unremittingly, keeping myself for my art alone and existing only in it.  My teachers had called me industrious.  Another phrase which always must make an artist laugh when applied to his art.

To those who know the wild pleasure, the almost mad joy of exercising a really natural gift, it sounds as funny as to talk of a drunkard industriously getting drunk.

However, this by the way.  The world is the world, and artists are artists; the artist may understand the world, but the world can never understand the artist.

I was happy, life passed like a golden dream till I was twenty-two, and my father was satisfied that I was an “industrious” student.

From twenty-two till now, when I was twenty-eight, life had opened out into fuller colour still.  My art remained the life of the soul, of all that was best in me, but the brain and the senses had come forward, demanding their share of recognition, too, and out of the many coloured strands of which we can weave our web of life, I had chosen that which gleams the next brightest to art, the strand of passion, and woven much with that.

I had travelled, passing from country to country, city to city, finding love and inspiration everywhere, for the world is full of both for those who desire and look for them, and now I had come on this coasting trip along the shores of Alaska in the same spirit, looking for pictures in the golden atmosphere, for joy in the golden days and nights.

My sketch-book was full of ideas and jottings, and I looked forward much to the landing at Sitka where I hoped to find new and good material.  The hopeless ugliness of the Alaskan natives had so far appalled me.  An artist chiefly of the face and figure, as I was, could not hope to find a model amongst them.  As our steamer had come up the coast I had looked in vain for even a decent-sized woman or child amongst them.  They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump shapeliness.  Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened, they never seem to be young.  They seem to start middle-aged and go on growing older.