Timothy Raeburn was the last of the Artists.

He lived in a garret in London, the very last of the garrets. Both he and the garret seemed to exist only by some oversight, in the present almost perfect state of things. A lingering echo of those now distant times when artists had been content to starve to death in such places, just for the mere glory of the thing.

Here he lived entirely alone and unfriended. He was a mystery. Nobody knew how he lived, or what secret force sustained him in his isolation from the world—not even Timothy himself : or by what

mysterious power he alone had managed to survive into the new and happier era. How did he maintain this detachment, where one by one the others failed?

Gradually the little band of Timothy’s fellow-artists had dwindled into nothing. The last survivors of the Post neo-Primitives. who had struggled so valiantly with the banner of reaction, had all capitulated in one way or another. For instance, during the past five years no fewer than one hundred and seventy-four cases of suicide had been announced among them. Only a month ago the Trumpet Blast had wasted three lines of a column on the death of Mr. J. A. Yeeke, the leader of the group and believed to be the last of the free-lances, who had last been seen reading a copy of this same Trumpet Blast, and had immediately done away with himself in a fit of sheer boredom.