For the long frieze of the Populace, or the People, or Humanity (the painter himself has no name for it), the first lines, long horizontal ones, indicated the continuous crests of breaking waves, here swelling in uninterrupted procession, here curling over in foam, here broken by intervals, and, following the suggestions of these lines appear the various heads of the multitude, mounting and falling but ever moving on. A sudden accent is marked by a head of greater importance, nearer the foreground; the bodies necessarily attached to these heads complete the wave movement, and if the body is too long, or declines to follow the required movement, it is interrupted by another head, or arm, or accessory. As the preliminary charcoal line was very carefully thought out (or, seen), the rhythm, the structural unity, the continuous movement of the whole, is preserved and makes itself felt. In no more ingenious way could this very varied multitude have been kept in the necessary harmony and fitness of things.

In this crowded frieze the figures, we believe, were largely put in in color before the models were called upon. To insure the unchanging permanence of these paintings no medium was used but benzine-which, for a number of years, this artist has employed in all his paintings

and this only for the preliminary laying in. The finishing is done in pure color, specially ground for him and containing but little oil. Care is also taken to avoid lumps, ever so slight. After the canvases have been placed on their final wall, and are thoroughly dry, they are varnished, and the colors, thus locked in, are treated to a thin coating of dissolved beeswax, which can be cleaned without injuring them. The smoothness of surface was considered as very important in preventing the lodging of dust through the ages; but since the adoption, and the enforcement, of rigid anti-soft-coal-smoke ordinances Pittsburg has lost her claim to be called the Smoky City.

T

HE old Professor, with Mrs. Cross, walked down the village street just as the sun was setting. The street ended on the bank of a narrow river which crept down from the hills. There was no wharf, no trading, no bustle there or anywhere. Oakford was always quiet and leisurely.

The village consisted of a small sectarian college, to which the sons of the poor farmers of the neighborhood came to make men of themselves, and a few old houses, set back along the crooked street, each in its garden and grove of maples, which were the homes of the professors and the poor widows, who took in the students to board. When they reached the bank the Professor motioned Mrs. Cross courteously to an old bench under a big tree. "Will you not sit down?" he said. "It is always so restful here. I like to listen to the plashing of the water

"Rest is not precisely the thing needed in Oakford just now,' said Mrs. Cross tartly.

She did not sit down. She was a plump erect little woman, and it occurred to her companion that her trig tailor-made gown and cap, with its defiant red pompon, gave her quite a military air. Old as he was, he liked to see a woman prettily dressed. "But not like a drummer-boy-No!" he thought. His own coat and baggy trousers were faded and patched. He had worn them many years, but it never in his life had occurred to him that anybody would measure him by his clothes. The Paulls had lived in Oakford since before the Revolution. Everybody knew them for what they were for bad or good-what had clothes to do with it?

Mrs. Cross had come to the town only a year ago. Her husband was prospecting for oil through Western Pennsylvania. She was one of the women who expect to give the world a big boost upward before they have done with it. Her especial work at

home in New England had been civic reform. Always used to act with and through clubs, she found it hard to stand alone here. "The Oakford people," she wrote home, "were born finished and content with their finishing." She had done her best to waken them, to drag them into some great upward movement of the age. She had applied to a well-known philanthropist for money for a free library. He promised her enough for the building (with his name over the door), but the towns-people would not agree to give the books. She then with his consent used the money to build and furnish a Home for Aged Men (with his name over the door). "If we can shut up the worn-out human lumber out of sight," she thought, "perhaps the young people will begin to do something to justify their right to live."

So far only two rooms in the home were filled. The towns-people raised money enough to take old Sam Darrah and Jim Paine out of the county almshouse and put them into it. "Men of too good birth," they said, "to herd with paupers."

After all her unselfish efforts this lack of success in the Home exasperated Mrs. Cross. Her husband had finished his work and they were going home in a day or two, not to return. She hated to be balked by the stupidity of these people in her effort to help them. As she walked back through the village with the Professor, she scanned the old man's face keenly.

She suddenly saw a way to ensure success to the Home through him. Her face grew scarlet. No! It wasn't delicate or seemly! But she braced herself, watching him sharply as he talked. Heaven knows she had nothing to gain by it.

No doubt, he was failing. His eyes had a watery, senile gleam. Sometimes he forgot to finish a sentence.

She went to work.

"I wish I could put new blood into this town!" she said.

The old man laughed. "No, we don't

keep step with the procession, I suppose," he said cheerfully. "But do we want to?" "Look at this main street," continued Mrs. Cross without heeding him. "The old houses, poked back into the damp among bushes and trees-and this open gutter overgrown with dandelions and star weed. You all call it a picturesque feature. If I had the money I'd start some kind of a factory here, and I'd build a row of neat little dwellings with nice tin roofs for the hands! I'd soon put life into the place, I tell you. I'll talk to some of my friends who have capital-they could bring a branch railway. It may be done yet!" "Factories-Hands?" gasped the old man. "No, we've never had that kind of thing. I suppose these houses do look mean to you. But you see the college is poor-the salaries always have been very small. The professors built their homes, most of us with our own hands. I did all the carpenter's work on mine. I was a strong young fellow then. It was a good job, a first-rate job, too, if I do say it. My wife" he stopped. He could not tell this strange woman how Jenny had painted and papered and what fun they had over it all. "I planted these big maples my self," he continued, "and I laid out that garden-forty years ago."

He stopped again, suddenly. He could not tell her of the hard years after Jenny died, when he tried to be father and mother both to the boys. They were sickly lads. Doctors and drugs ran away with money fast. There were years when he had never tasted meat. If it had not been for that little potato patch yonder he would have starved.

He took off his hat and wiped his forehead. "It's growing quite warm," he said. "But on the whole, Doctor, you had a successful life?" she persisted, smiling up at him.

"Certainly, Madam, certainly. My boys grew up healthy men. One, as you know, is now an instructor in the college, and the other a physician. We all nest together yonder in the old house, and I am sure they love it as much as I do. I don't believe anything would induce them to alter it or to live anywhere else."

"I can't understand how anybody can spend affection on a house!" interrupted Mrs. Cross testily. "I require that my

home shall have the best plumbing and every modern convenience. Then I am satisfied with it. But as for love—!"

The old man looked at her wistfully for a moment. "Well, well," he said gently. "We are not all built alike, you know."

"No. And so you all herd together. And one of your sons is married? And has children?"

He bowed, but again looked curiously at her. Little Molly, he thought, would not have asked so many questions. Molly was the little daughter who had died when she was but two years old. He and her mother always had loved her more perhaps than the boys, and they had fallen into the habit of measuring other girls by their little child who was gone out of sight for a while, but who was always near them.

He looked critically at his companion as they walked, smiling to himself. "No, Molly never would ask a question that hurt. She was not like this person in any way," he thought complacently.

Mrs. Cross, on her part, was scanning the old man's face again keenly. Undoubtedly, he was failing. There were signs of dotage. In all probability his children felt him to be a dead-weight on them and would be glad to be rid of him. She had once seen his chamber in the Paull home, and its old mahogany furniture. She would willingly herself pay the three hundred for it which would admit him to the Home. The bedstead alone would bring double that sum in Boston. And when Doctor Paull was once an inmate of the Home, all the other worn-out old people in Oakford would crowd into it. Her work would then not be in vain.

"Did it ever occur to you, Doctor," she said abruptly, "how much harder the conditions of life are upon young married people now than they were on you? Your sons, for example. Their incomes, I imagine, are not much larger than yours was at their age, while the rates of living have trebled and quadrupled, and there are a hundred demands on them every year for outlays of which you never heard."

"I have not heard them complain," the old Professor said calmly.

"No, of course not. You would be the last one to whom they would talk of the load which they are struggling to carry."

There was a short silence. The old man

was frowning and glancing around him uncertainly.

"In my part of the country," said Mrs. Cross resolutely, "a large number of old people of small means go into Homes. It is the just, reasonable course. Their work is done. They are a heavy weight upon their children. In the Homes they are comfortable, properly fed, according to the best hygienic rules; in case of sickness are furnished with drugs and medical aid, and when they die, if necessary, are buried respectably without cost to their families. In the meantime the young folk are set free to work for themselves and the world. That is just. Why, in their strongest and most useful years should their houses and their lives be cluttered with a lot of helpless old men and women waiting to be nursed through their dotage? It's a shame! An outrage!"

The old man stopped short and looked at her. The blood had slowly ebbed out of his face, his chin quivered.

"You mean-?" he said.

"Yes, yes. Don't be worried, my dear sir! It isn't so tragic a thing. Quite an every-day matter with us. Come back here to this bench. I'll explain it to you." The explanation was long; the old college clock struck six before they came out again from the shadow of the trees. Mrs. Cross, in the light, looked anxiously into the old man's face and then began to tug excitedly at her gloves. The Doctor had made no answer to her arguments. He had listened in absolute silence. When she turned to go up the street, he followed her. "No, no! I beg of you, Doctor. I need no escort. One could run all over Oakford at midnight with perfect safety."

"Probably. But you must allow me to attend you, Madam. It grows too dark, I think, for a lady to be abroad alone."

He walked beside her in silence for a while. And then spoke of nothing but of a flurry of snow which had fallen in the morning.

"Good-night," she said briskly, when they reached her door. "You will send me your decision to-morrow, sir? And you will keep in mind my offer about the mahogany?" The Doctor bowed, looking at her as through a mist, and then turned to go down the street again.

Mrs. Cross, in writing to her husband

that evening, touched but lightly on this matter. James was a dull man of business and did not always sympathize fully in her benevolent enthusiasms.

"I feel that I have finished my stint in Oakford," she wrote, "and shall be quite ready to go back to our routine work at home. Nothing short of a cataclysm would waken these people to any mental or spiritual effort. The Home, however, promises to be a partial success. Dr. Paull, who belongs to one of the most prominent families here, will go into it to-morrow, and I have no doubt that his example soon will be followed by the other useless old men and women who are now dead-weights on their families. At least in that effort to uplift this community, I shall not have worked in vain."

She closed and directed the letter with a complacent smile, remembering that in dealing with the old man she had used a little skilful trickery. His sons, it happened, were both absent from town to-day. When they returned he would be snugly settled in the Home. They probably would protest a little for form's sake, but no doubt at heart would thank her for relieving them of their burden.

"With a people so sluggish, one must use decision-not reason," she thought, nodding her head with an air of finality, and honestly feeling herself to be a sort of archangel sent out to deal with the souls of men.

Old Doctor Paull just then had shut himself into his own room and locked the door. He sat motionless in the dark corner a while. He knew that he was there to make a great decision about something that concerned his whole life. But that queer blur had come into his head that bothered him sometimes lately-a strange torpor coming from outside foreign to himself. He could not remember just what the question.

was

Both of his sons had gone on business to the county-seat, and would not be back until the next evening. Frederica, his son Tom's wife, was at some quilting or other woman's party. She was a gay, cordial little woman and loved fun. Usually, when he and the children were thus left alone together, they made a regular frolic of the evening, called the supper a party, told stories and played games in which they always made Grandpa "It." That might