Singularly enough, almost all the best stories that I have heard from my sitters have been told by accident.  I only remember two cases in which a story was volunteered to me; and, although I have often tried the experiment, I cannot call to mind even a single instance in which leading questions (as lawyers call them) on my part, addressed to a sitter, ever produced any result worth recording.  Over and over again I have been disastrously successful in encouraging dull people to weary me.  But the clever people who have something interesting to say seem, so far as I have observed them, to acknowledge no other stimulant than chance.  For every story, excepting one, I have been indebted, in the first instance, to the capricious influence of the same chance.  Something my sitter has seen about me, something I have remarked in my sitter, or in the room in which I take the likeness, or in the neighbourhood through which I pass on my way to work, has suggested the necessary association, or has started the right train of recollections, and then the story appeared to begin of its own accord.  Occasionally the most casual notice, on my part, of some very unpromising object has smoothed the way for the relation of a long and interesting narrative.  I first heard one of the most dramatic stories merely through being carelessly inquisitive to know the history of a stuffed poodle-dog.

It is thus not without reason that I lay some stress on the desirableness of prefacing the following narrative by a brief account of the curious manner in which I became possessed of it.  As to my capacity for repeating the story correctly, I can answer for it that my memory may be trusted.  I may claim it as a merit, because it is, after all, a mechanical one, that I forget nothing, and that I can call long-past conversations and events as readily to my recollection as if they had happened but a few weeks ago.  Of two things at least I feel tolerably certain before-hand, in meditating over its contents:  first, that I can repeat correctly all that I have heard; and, secondly, that I have never missed anything worth hearing when my sitters were addressing me on an interesting subject.  Although I cannot take the lead in talking while I am engaged in painting, I can listen while others speak, and work all the better for it.

So much in the way of general preface to the pages for which I am about to ask the reader’s attention.  Let me now advance to particulars, and describe how I came to hear the story.  I begin with it because it is the story that I have oftenest “rehearsed,” to borrow a phrase from the stage.  Wherever I go, I am sooner or later sure to tell it.  Only last night I was persuaded into repeating it once more by the inhabitants of the farm-house in which I am now staying.