Unknown in thy unworthiness.
—Henry Clayton Hopkins.
THE MAN HE KNEW
[Until he becomes an artistic star of the first magnitude (when he is apt to be as rich and as arrogant as the fabled Indian Rajah,) the world is often exceedingly ungenerous to the struggling young painter, however talented he may be. Even Paris—usually so kind to budding genius—is sometimes guilty of this offense. The following little narrative will prove the truth of my statement.]
Little Barlow was very poor indeed and, what was much more serious, had stretched his limited credit just as far as it would go. He didn’t like to do this at all, but there was no help for it and it grieved him sorely. Therefore he became daily more despairing and sick at heart as one by one his most promising schemes for money making came to naught and the trades-people presented their bills with a machine-like promptness and inevitability.
He possessed only one living relative in America, a millionaire uncle—who was addicted to the pernicious habit of endowing memorial hospitals and colleges in total oblivion of his duty towards his only nephew. Little Barlow had timidly approached this uncle for help the year before—when he was suffering almost as badly from a similarly acute period of ill-chance—and had received three hundred dollars by cable in return, but, when the American mail arrived a week afterward, it brought with it such an unnecessarily brutal letter that he heartily regretted that by paying his creditors nearly all the money he had rendered himself powerless to send it flying back across the ocean, accompanied by the very choicest anathemas in his vocabulary.