Neal reported years later that he could not believe his eyes and ears; it was impossible that a denizen of the high kingdom of art should descend to such vulgarity. Suddenly he remembered Stuart's reputation for practical jokes. Of course, genius had to have its vagaries; Neal smiled wanly, but his smile faded when Stuart tossed off half a tumbler at one swallow and peremptorily ordered him to drink up. The frightened youngster explained that he had been brought up on "the plainest of wholesome food"; liquor had never touched his lips. At this Stuart laughed raucously and winked, as much as to say: "Can't you trust me?" He tossed ofE a whole tumblerful this time, and wished for better acquaintance.

The young man remembered the rest of the interview with hor­ror. Stuart, the godlike painter whose work Neal so admired, made a series of the vilest puns, and laughed at them immoderately. He criticized the saintly burghers of Boston, calling the righteous statutes by which they regulated their neighbours "blue laws" which showed "the bigotry and fanaticism of the day." Not a word of art came from between the heavy lips; the old man, who ob­viously enjoyed shocking his visitor, talked about wine. He boasted that he was the best judge of wines "on this side of the water," and told innumerable stories to demonstrate it. Neal recalled with par­ticular disapproval how Stuart gloated over the gay parties he had attended in Philadelphia, where he had belonged to a club of a dozen or twenty good fellows, "who were a law unto themselves."

Once a year they got together, each bringing a bottle for every guest, a dozen or twenty, according to the number who were com­ing, and it was a point of honour to drink up every drop before dawn.

All the while he talked, Stuart was filling his capacious nostrils from a snuff-box "nearly as large round as the top of a small hat." This snuff-box, one of the biggest ever seen in America, was. fa­mous in Stuart's circle; once, after he had mislaid it, a friend hired a porter with a wheelbarrow to bring it back. On another occasion, when Stuart was entertaining two young painters less prudish than Neal, one of them asked him for a pinch. "I will give it to you," Stuart replied, "but I advise you not to take it. Snuff-taking is a pernicious, vile, dirty habit, and like all bad habits to "be carefully avoided."

"Your practice," the young painter remembers he replied, "con­tradicts your precept, Mr. Stuart."

"Sir, / can't help it. Shall I tell you a story? You were neither of you ever in England, so I must describe an English stage-coach of my time. It was a large vehicle of the coach kind, with a railing around the top to secure outside passengers, and a basket behind for baggage and such travellers as could not be elsewhere accom­modated. In such a carriage, full within, loaded on the top, and an additional unfortunate stowed with the stuff in the basket, I hap­pened to be travelling in a dark night, when coachee contrived to overturn us all—or, as they say in New York, dump us—in a ditch. We scrambled up, felt our legs and arms to be convinced that they were not broken, and finding on examination that inside and out­side passengers were tolerably whole (on the whole), someone thought of the poor devil who was shut with the' baggage in the basket. He was found apparently senseless, and his neck twisted awry. One of the passengers, who had heard that any dislocation might be remedied if promptly attended to, seized on the corpse with a determination to untwist the man's neck and set his head straight on his shoulders. Accordingly, with an iron grasp he clutched him by the head, and began pulling and twisting by main force. He appeared to have succeeded miraculously in restoring life, for the dead man no sooner experienced the first wrench than he roared vociferously:.'Let me alonet Let me alonel I'm not hurt; I was born so!' Gentlemen," added Stuart, "I was born so." He took an enormous pinch of snuff, "I was born in a snuff mill."