Another evening, at the theater, an usher said obligingly:  “Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a white feather in your hair, just on top.”

* * * * *

Raging characteristically once when in Paris, he earned this rebuke from Degas, the matchless draughtsman:  “Whistler, you talk as if you were a man without talent.”

* * * * *

Some one gave Henry Irving a Whistler etching for a Christmas gift.  “Of course I was delighted,” he said, “for I was a great admirer of the artist as well as a personal friend of the man, but when I started to hang the etching I was puzzled.  I couldn’t for the life of me tell which was the top and which the bottom.  Finally, after reversing the picture half a dozen times and finding it looked equally well either way up, I decided to try an experiment.

“I invited Whistler to dine with me and seated him opposite his picture.  During dinner he glanced at it from time to time; between the soup and the fish he put up his eyeglass and squinted at it; between the roast and the dessert he got up and walked over to take a closer view of it; finally, by the time we reached the coffee, he had discovered what the trouble was.

“‘Why, Henry,’ he said, reproachfully, ’you’ve hung my etching upside down.’

“‘Indeed!’ I said.  ’Well, my friend, it’s taken you an hour to discover it!’” “The man in possession” furnishes an amusing incident in the artist’s career.

When the creditors at last landed a bailiff in the painter’s Chelsea mansion, he tried to wear his hat in the drawing-room and smoke and spit all over the house.  But Whistler, in his own airy way, soon settled that.  He went out into the hall, and, selecting a stick from his collection of canes, he daintily knocked the man’s hat off.  The bailiff was so surprised that he forgot to be angry, and in a day or two he had been trained to wait at table.  But though he was now in possession and a favored household servant, he could not obtain his money.  So he declared that if he was not paid he would have to put bills up outside the house announcing a sale.  And sure enough, a few days after great posters were stuck up all over the front of the house announcing so many tables and so many chairs and so much old Nankin China for sale on a given day.  Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and hastened to send out invitations to all his friends to a luncheon-party, adding as a postscript:  “You will know the house by the bills of sale stuck up outside.”  And the bailiff proved an admirable butler and the party one of the merriest ever known.

As the guests were rising from the table a lady observed to the host: 

“Your servants seem to be extremely attentive, Mr. Whistler, and anxious to please you.”

“Oh, yes,” replied he; “I assure you they wouldn’t leave me!”