So we talked for quite a little time, and I told him about Uncle trying to get work and how hard it was and how at last he had got work, or at least had gone out to get it, as a painter.  Mr. Peters said that that was fine.  He said that painters do well here:  he has a lot of friends who are painters and they get all the way from sixty to seventy-five cents an hour.  It seems so odd to think of them being paid by the hour.  I don’t think the court artists at home were paid like that.  It will be very nice if Uncle William can mingle with Mr. Peters’s artist friends.  Mr. Peters asked if he might take me out some Sunday, and I said that I would ask Uncle William and Uncle Henry and Cousin Ferdinand and Cousin Willie and if they all consented to come I would go.  I hope it was not a forward thing to do.

I forgot when I was talking of work to say that Uncle Henry got work the very second day that we were here.  He works down at the docks where the ships are.  I think he supervises the incoming and outgoing of the American navy.  It is called being a stevedore, and no doubt his being an Admiral helped him to get it.  He hopes to get a certificate presently to be a Barge Master, which will put him in charge of the canals.  But there is a very difficult examination to go through and Uncle Henry is working for it at night out of a book.  He has to take up Vulgar Fractions which, of course, none of our High Seas Command were asked to learn.  But Uncle Henry is stooping to them.

So now, I think, everything will go well.

CHAPTER IV

Uncle’s art has failed.  It was only yesterday that I was writing in my memoirs of how cheerful and glad I felt to think that Uncle William was going to be able to make his living by art, and now everything is changed again.  All the time that Uncle was out on his visit to the picture dealers, I was making plans and thinking what we would do with the money when it came in, so it is very disappointing to have it all come to nothing.  I don’t know just what happened because Uncle William never gives any details of things.  His mind moves too rapidly for that.  But he came home with his pictures still under his arm in a perfect fury and raged up and down his room, using very dreadful language.

But after a little while when he grew calmer he explained to me that the Americans are merely swineheads and that art, especially art such as his, is wasted on them.  Uncle says that he has no wish to speak harshly of the Americans, but they are pig-dogs.  He bears them no ill-will, he says, for what they have done and his heart is free of any spirit of vengeance, but he wishes he had his heel on their necks for about half a minute.  He said this with such a strange dreadful snarl that for the moment his face seemed quite changed.  But presently when he recovered himself he got quite cheerful again, and said that it was perhaps unseemly in him, as the guest of the