Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

III
Frank Hopkinson Smith I had known in New York
before I happened to run across him one morning as he
was sketching in the Piazza delle Erbe in Verona. There
or in Venice or in Constantinople or Mexico or elsewhere,
his habit of memorandum-making was the same. If a
thing caught the fancy of his eyes, he would consign it
to the first expanse of blank space at hand-a scrap of
pasteboard, the fly-leaf of a guide-book, the back of an
envelope-in what seemed to me to be an altogether irregular if not ignoble method of scrawliness. Sometimes
he may have used a kodak, but I never saw him handling
one. That function was reserved, while we were in company, to a poor mechanical layman like myself. I was
elated when the products of my industry in Venice won
the sole certificate of photographic merit that ever came
from authority:
July 11 [18961
DEAR MITCHELL: They are all FINE! Thank you very much
for every one of them.
Yours aff'y, F HOPKL'SON SMIH.
Anyhow, the despised camera did manage to preserve
for this book the only correct representation known to me
of Hopkinson Smith in the act of painting in water-colors
his favorite view of the Salute across the mouth of the
Grand Canal from a point on the Riva degli Schiavoni
just beyond Danieli's. Furthermore, it shows Smith's
cherished gondolier and attendant, the faithful Giorgio,
enforcing the dead-line for the protection of this modern
painter. Of Giorgio's subsequent discomfiture and apo

theosis I shall have something to say.
We went together from Verona to Venice and lived as
near neighbors and daily companions for a fortnight or
more at the Hotel Britannia on the Grand Canal. Smith's