Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/63

 the tiny statuette, as now seen, and, as the starch dried, the fabric stiffened, still retaining its most delicately natural folds. Poor Ewing! He died in poverty, and was buried in New York. A great actor, whose name has already been mentioned, stood by him till the last.

It is impossible to catalogue the curiosities in the study; every one of them has a history. A little stuffed canary was a present from the late Lady Rosebery. It died; it almost sang itself to death, so loud and sweet and frequent were its notes. These ostrich eggs hanging from the ceiling were stolen from a mosque in Morocco. Mr. Sala was the receiver, and he revels in his crime. This picture is curious. It is executed on a common fourpenny dish, purchased in the Tottenham Court-road. It was held over the smoke of a candle, and, after the artist had worked on it with his nails and penknife, a charming Italian landscape was the result. A table of eighteen different kinds of wood was presented to Mr. Sala by the New Zealand Government. A glass case contains presentation silver, including a massive service from the proprietors of The Daily Telegraph on Mr. Sala's fiftieth birthday. The pictures, too, are striking—dozens of Millais' engravings, Munkacski, Caton Woodville, Boughton, Story, and paintings by De Witt, Stothardt, Montalba, another Doré, a Keeley Halswelle, and numerous others from notable artists. Amongst the pictorial curiosities being some studies by E. M. Ward for his great picture of "Napoleon and Queen Louisa of Prussia at Tilsit, 1808"; Ape,' aped by himself," which means the late Carlo Pellegrini caricaturing himself; and a pictorially addressed envelope, which was done by Augustus Mayhew, one of the brothers Mayhew of Punch, the dog being a portrait of a pug belonging to the artist's wife, who was, and still is, a great breeder of pugs. On the top of a shelf is the bust of Beaconsfield. It will be remembered that Mr. Sala gave important evidence at the famous Belt trial, and stated how he saw the sculptor take a piece of clay and make the curl which was wont to be seen on the great statesman's forehead. This is the first cast for the statue in question.

Now it was that we settled down to talk.