I had only one servant, a young man from the moorland country on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, perfectly well adapted to life in the Highlands. He had excellent health, and was physically a good specimen of our north-English race. It was a pleasure to see his tall straight figure going over the roughest ground with no appearance of hurry, but in fact with such unostentatious swiftness that few sportsmen could follow him. I was myself active enough then, and accustomed to wild places, but he always restrained himself when we did any mountain work together. He afterwards became well known as the "Thursday" of the "Painter's Camp," but I may give his real name here, which was Young Helliwell. Temperate, hardy, and extremely prudent, not to be caught by any allurements of vulgar pleasure, he lived wisely in youth, and will probably have fewer regrets than most people in his old age.
Young had studied the art of simple cookery at Hollins, so he was able to keep me tolerably well when we happened to have anything to eat, which was not always. There were no provision shops on Lochaweside; Inverary was at some distance in one direction and Oban in the other, and as I had never given a thought to feeding before, I was an utterly incompetent provider. The consequence was that we fasted like monks, except that our abstinence was not on any regular principle; in fact, sometimes we had so little to eat for days together that we began to feel quite weak. This gave us no anxiety, and we only laughed at it, undereating being always more conducive to good spirits than its opposite, provided that it is not carried too far.
The camp consisted of three structures,--my hut, which was made of wooden panels with plate-glass windows; a tent for Young, with a wooden floor, and wooden sides to the height of three feet; lastly, a military bell-tent that served for storing things. My hut was both painting-room and habitation, but it would have been better to have had a separate painting-room on rather a larger scale. Mr. Herkomer afterwards imitated the hut for painting from nature in Wales, and he introduced a clever improvement by erecting his hut on a circular platform with a ring-rail, so that it could be turned at will to any point of the compass. Young's tent was, in fact, also a kind of hut with a square tent for a roof.