Skepticism still lingered with me for a time, but when I saw the second train growing, the figures and apparatus gradually being modeled, and the correspondence and conferences going on between the artist and several companies which wished to gain control of the result, I was perfectly sure that his idea would some day be realized.

As I have said, when I first met S——­ he had not realized any of his dreams.  It was just at that moment that the tide was about to turn.  He surprised me by the assurance, born of his wonderful virility, with which he went about all things.

“I’ve got an order from the Ladies’ Home Journal,” he said to me one day.  “They came to me.”

“Good,” I said.  “What is it?”

“Somebody’s writing up the terminal facilities of New York.”

He had before him an Academy board, on which was sketched, in wash, a midnight express striking out across the Jersey meadows with sparks blazing from the smoke stacks and dim lights burning in the sleepers.  It was a vivid thing, strong with all the strength of an engine, and rich in the go and enthusiasm which adhere to such mechanisms.

“I want to make a good thing of this,” he said.  “It may do me some good.”

A little later he received his first order from Harper’s.  He could not disguise that he was pleased, much as he tried to carry it off with an air.  It was just before the Spanish war broke out, and the sketches he was to do related to the navy.

He labored at this order with the most tireless enthusiasm.  Marine construction was his delight anyhow, and he spent hours and days making studies about the great vessels, getting not only the atmosphere but the mechanical detail.  When he made the pictures they represented all that he felt.

“You know those drawings?” he said the day after he delivered them.

“Yes.”

“I set a good stiff price on them and demanded my drawings back when they were through.”

“Did you get them?”

“Yep.  It will give them more respect for what I’m trying to do,” he said.

Not long after he illustrated one of Kipling’s stories.

He was in high feather at this, but grim and repressed withal.  One could see by the nervous movements of his wiry body that he was delighted over it.

At this time Kipling came to his studio.  It was by special arrangement, but S——­ received him as if he were—­well, as artists usually receive authors.  They talked over the galley proofs, and the author went away.

“It’s coming my way now,” he said, when he could no longer conceal his feelings.  “I want to do something good on this.”

Through all this rise from obscurity to recognition he lived close to his friends—­a crowd of them, apparently, always in his studio jesting, boxing, fencing—­and interested himself in the mechanics I have described.  His drawing, his engine-building, his literary studies and recreations were all mixed, jumbled, plunging him pell-mell, as it were, on to distinction.  In the first six months of his studio life he had learned to fence, and often dropped his brush to put on the mask and assume the foils with one of his companions.