refreshing about him; while still another rich eccentric, who has lived on his yacht anchored near the English coast for some fifteen years or so in order to avoid payment of his American taxes, and who occasionally amuses himself by having gold pieces heated white hot and thrown into the sea for diving boys to pick them up, shows a quaint ingenuity which deserves our gratitude.  Another modern example of how to spend, or waste, one’s money picturesquely was provided by the late Marquis of Anglesey, a young lord generally regarded as crazy by an ungrateful England.  Perhaps it was a little crazy in him to spend so much money in the comparatively commonplace adventure of taking an amateur dramatic company through the English provinces, he himself, I believe, playing but minor roles; but lovers of Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse will see in that but a charmingly boyish desire to translate a beloved dream into a reality—­though his creditors probably did not take that view.  Neither, one can surmise, did those gentlemen sufficiently appreciate his passion for amassing amazing waistcoats, of which some seven hundred were found in his wardrobe at his lamented death; or strange and beautiful walking sticks, a like prodigious collection of which were among the fantastic assets which represented his originally large personal fortune on the winding up of his earthly affairs.  Among these unimaginative creditors were, doubtless, many jewellers who found it hard to sympathize with his lordship’s genial after-dinner habit, particularly when in the society of fair women, of plunging his hand into his trousers pocket and bringing it forth again brimming over with uncut precious stones of many colours, at the same time begging his companion to take her choice of the moonlit rainbowed things.  The Marquis of Anglesey died at the early age of twenty-nine, much lamented, as I have hinted—­by his creditors, but no less sincerely lamented, too, by those for whom his flamboyant personality and bizarre whims added to that gaiety of nations sadly in need today of such figures.  A friend of mine owns two of the wonderful waistcoats.  Sometimes he wears one as we lunch together, and on such occasions we always drink in silence to the memory of his fantastic lordship.

These examples of rich men of our own time who have known how to spend their money with whim and fancy and flourish are but exceptions to my argument, lights shining, so to say, in a great darkness.  As a general rule, it is the poor or comparatively poor man, the man lacking the very necessary material of the art, who is an artist of this kind.  It is the man with but little money who more often provides examples of the delightful way of spending it.  I trust that Mr. Richard Harding Davis will not resent my recalling a charming feat of his in this connection.  Of course Mr. Davis is by no means a poor man, as all we who admire his writings are glad to know.  Still, successful writer as he is, he is not yet,