Page:Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1904).djvu/41

 was needed, the pair was disposed of for six hundred pounds.35

Whilst the hawthorn pots were being admired and discussed, Rossetti was hastily pulling out drawer after drawer from an old cabinet that stood in one of the recesses of the room. He was searching for something suitable to paint round the neck of the girl in his picture The Loving Cup, and before him lay a rare store of necklaces, featherwork, Japanese crystals, and knick-knacks of all kinds, sufficient to stock a small window. At length his choice was made of a necklace, and when this was satisfactorily settled, his costumes, which were kept in a large wardrobe at the back of the studio, were overhauled for one that was needed for another painting which he had in progress.

In going towards this wardrobe, I noticed upon one of the walls of the studio a gilt frame containing about half a dozen drawings and sketches, chiefly by members of the Præraphaelite Brotherhood,36 with the names of John Everett Millais,37 William Holman Hunt,38 Thomas Woolner,39 William Bell Scott,40 Ford Madox Brown,41 and James McNeil Whistler attached.

Wherever I went, I noticed musical instruments of some kind or another; all were old and mostly stringed mandolines, lutes, dulcimers, and barbarous-looking things of Chinese fashioning, which I imagine it would have been a great trial to the nerves to hear played upon—and yet in all the after years that I lived in the house I never