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further than the soft small heads that are your own. . . . There are so many children without any mothers at all ... as yours might be had I been what you feared but now.

"Broken glass! Is it not worse than broken glass for a young thing like that, as white-souled as that bit of snow on the hedge-have ye ever heard the talk of house servants? And the only place she can go to get away from it when ye do not want her for your children is her own little room that is so cold.

"She does not understand as yet, the whiteness in her is so white and the servants' hall is warm and pleasant and full of the laughter that ye sometimes hear and frown about. She knows no more than you do of the black heart beneath the white coat of the rascal that is so soft stepping and pleasant and keeps your silver so clean and bright an' says 'Very good, sir,' to everything the boss says to him

"Impossible!"

"Does it not happen every day? Do men and women leave off bein' men and women because they do your housework for you? Hearts as well as platters can break in the kitchen, and what do ye care what goes on among the help so long as your house is clean and quiet?

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"Broken glass. Her voice rose with the rising wind, thinly. . . ."Wirra, wirra-an' a colleen as innocent of the danger of it as your baby that danced upon it unharmed-praise the saints!-unharmed. . . .”

Between anger and fright, Mrs. Waring leaned forward to pluck at the shawl which the other held about her head. At the moment a shaft of light, probably the searchlight from some vessel close inshore-or was it something else?-fell upon the woman's face. It was gone so quickly that Mrs. Waring could not afterward swear to what

No.

Not Mrs. Magilli

she had seen. cuddy's face, but similar. Lined and worn, singularly noble. "Who are you?"

"Do ye ask me that?" said the Voice. The flash of light having passed, it seemed so dark that now Mrs. Waring could not even distinguish the film of shadow that had showed where the woman stood.

"Do ye ask me that, mother that loves her children? What would ye do, then, if ye were dead, and your children's tears fell upon ye in purgatory? What would ye do if the feet of yer own colleen were standing among broken glass that is broken glass indeed?"

"Who are you?" whimpered Mrs. Waring. But the little moon had risen now and showed the moor empty except for the silent lights of the cottages where little children were.

As she stumbled at her own doorstep her butler opened the door with obsequious concern, and obvious amazement when she cried out-"Aileen-where is she?"

"In her room, I think, m'm; the children being asleep. Shall 1 call her, m'm?”

"No!"

She hurried to the attic room and knocked. The door was locked. Something stirred softly and opened. Aileen's frightened eyes sought her mistress's face. Mrs. Waring read dread of something having been stolen, of some terrible oversight in the nursery, of instant dismissal.

The girl coughed and shivered. She was wearing her coat but her little cap and apron were ready for instant duty. Mrs. Waring remembered with a shock of contrition that Martha had cried because Aileen's hands were cold as she dressed her. "Aileen-" sobbed Mrs. Waring. "Oh, you poor little thing-Come down, child, where it is warm!"

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F

The Folly of Going to See

OREIGNERS sometimes speak with wonder of the strange vein of idealism in us, the most materialistic of modern nations, which keeps us forever on the trail, throughout Europe, of vanished genius. It is odd, they say, that a people so full of passion for dollars and cents should show such desire to tread the very ground that Shakespeare trod, to step upon the Auld Brig at Ayr, and they think the better of us for the discovery of this unsuspected idealism. I sometimes wonder if it is idealism at all; if, rather, the passion which draws us in such crowds to the literary and other shrines of the past is not the very flower, the subtle, ultimate manifestation of our overwhelming materialism. Does it not contain an element akin to that souvenir-hunting instinct that makes us feel a thrill as of acquiring real nobility when we steal the toilet articles of a duke? We chip off bits from St. Peter's, get splinters of oak from Westminster Abbey, and hide in our pockets sprigs of green from Ann Hathaway's garden, but are we thereby one whit nearer the grandeur that was Rome, or was England, or was Shakespeare? Is not our glory-stalking instinct rather another proof of our lack of ideality and of imaginative power? We mistake the sign for the thing signified, mix up the philosopher's snuff-box with his ideas, and confuse his old hat with the subtle lightning of his brain.

Who and what are we, after all, that we should expect to see in any given spot immortalized by poet or seer that which he saw? The folly, the conceived folly of it! For it is precisely that which the poet did to it which makes the difference between him, and you, and me; if he had seen but that which you and I see when we take the train and go there, he would not have been a poet. We puzzle our brains and our eyes trying to discern in the low-lying Eildon Hills the magic charm they wore for Scott, and the worst of it is, we pretend to see it whether we do or not! We prevaricate, even as the guide-book; we play-act at being the "Wizard of the North." Well-meaning folk alight from motor or aeroplane at Burns's cottage and look amiably about for the mouse and the daisy. Good heavens! what would they do with them if they found them! We loiter in

the paths of Wordsworth through Grasmere, searching for Leech Gatherer and Old Cumberland Beggar, that we may try to invest them with the "visionary gleam" of which we have read. One might as well try to borrow the pupil of William Wordsworth's eye; or request the loan of his soul for a few minutes; or ask him if, being in rather straightened circumstances, he would not like to rent out his imagination for a little time. The difference between his Grasmere and ours is just that which made him Wordsworth, and you and me John Jones or Mary Smith; why should we expect that fine, intangible something, whose existence is the result of god-like intuition, to be granted us? We can apprehend it, if at all, only through the soul; it flies the touch of the finger, and the farther we stay away the better. To follow Browning to Asolo, gleaming white against the far blue of the mountains across the Lombard plain, is surely the height of folly, for Asolo is the one spot in the world where one could least well see Browning's Asolo. Ah, no, our travel, our sightseeing are not a proof of idealism, but of the lack of it, the stupid subterfuge of a dull and literal world; the logical result of folly in thinking that the sight of the eyes means vision; the habit of a blind, scientific generation that puts pins through dragonflies, and imagines that it has caught and classified them. What a dragon-fly is, whence it cometh and whither it goeth, such a generation will never know. Was not one good lady who thought she cherished a deep devotion to Charles Lamb detected trying to discover in the time-table "Mackery End in Hertfordshire"? She must have been quite capable of bringing over in her trunk painted toys for Lamb's "Dream Children." I have no doubt that some enterprising American will yet be found inquiring when the boat leaves for Avalon.

The species of disillusionment that comes from stepping in earth-made shoes into the kingdom of the imagination are many and deserved. Most poignant is the sense of loss in seeing the beauty of which you have read and dreamed vanish. How many places have you ruined by taking the train to them? How many have you robbed of their immemorial

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charm by your coming? Was Athens there
when you got there? Was Rome? As for me,
I have parted with my last illusions; I have
rubbed the bloom off antiquity; I have peered,
at Mycene, into tombs that were meant to be
closed through earth's forever; I have pried
into secrets that were meant to be kept, and I
have had my reward. Instead of that glory-
lighted land of heroes, with buildings of un-
imaginable beauty standing against the bluest
sky, I have a mind full of dust, of broken stones,
and of modern streets where petty officers go
strutting about twirling their mustaches. A
flood of undesirable light from whose glare I
shall never escape has been thrown upon an-
cient Greece, whose beauty was so real and so
true as I watched from my own far-away door-
step. I have journeyed out to Colonus to meet
Antigone, at the sacred spot "thick-set with
laurel, olive, vine, a feathered choir of nightin-
gales making music at its heart," and what
have I found? A pitiless, unshaded, sun-dried
plain, made awful by the empty beds of dead
streams, and there for me in memory, in place
of the blind, majestic king and the noblest
woman of antiquity, one large, lean, black and
white goat winds and unwinds himself about
the scarred trunk of a single pepper tree. And
as I watch it, with my mind's eye, forgetting
the griefs of Edipus in simple human wonder
as to when the goat last had a drink, I reflect
that my punishment is just. So may all fare
who give up their birthright of dreams for a
mess of hard facts; who transform the glory
of vision into three dimensions; who buy six-
months' tickets to the kingdom of the spirit.

O

LD, as well as reprehensible, is the habit of inserting into a comedy of manners the lay figure of a clergyman for the single bald purpose of poking fun at him. This stock company clergyman is over two hundred years old. Macaulay says that he figures largely in the comedy of the seventeenth century. Did Shadwell or Congreve invent him, or was he caricatured from contemporary life?-to wit, from the unhappy chaplain of that once so common Squire, who

The Clergy in Fiction

"thought that it belonged to his dignity to have grace said every day at his table by an ecclesiastic in full canonicals"? The position of such a "Levite," as he was called, was by no means a sinecure. "Sometimes," continues the historian, "the reverend man nailed up the apri

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cots, and sometimes . . . he walked ten miles with a letter or a parcel." He was expected to be "always ready in fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovelboard." At dinner "he might fill himself with the cornedbeef and carrots, but as soon as the tarts and cheese-cakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat and stood apart until he was summoned of which he had been excluded." to return thanks for a repast from a great part

I think, the ancestor of all that race of creatThis unfortunate chaplain must have been, ures neither brute nor human, the clergymen of English fiction. Poor Tom Tusher in toes," or Mr. Collins in "Pride and Preju"Esmond" "creaking on his great square dice," listening obsequiously to the advice of his patroness; Mr. Honeyman, Mr. Slope, and at Dr. Blimber's, who "prepared for the even young Tozer, Paul Dombey's school-mate Church by wearing a starched white cambric neckerchief”—all are the descendants, for his sins, of this seventeenth century chaplain.

is their appetite for dainty fare and strong Very characteristic of these fictitious clergy waters. Mr. Chadband, in "Bleak House," nourished his quadruple adjectives on an unwholesomely rich diet. herd," too, of the second Mrs. Weller was The favorite "shepgenerally found seated beside "a reeking hot glass of pineapple rum and water." "I was agoing to say," the elder Weller cautiously confides to Sam, "he always brings now a flat bottle as holds about a pint and a half, and fills it with the pineapple rum afore he goes away." Dr. Middleton in "The Egoist" follows the same tradition, and readily sacricentenarian Port. And who can forget the fices his lovely daughter for Sir Willoughby's three curates in "Shirley" rejoicing at their supper?

is his ladylike manner and fastidious dress.
A favorite mark of the novelist clergyman
Unrivalled in this regard is Clive Newcome's
reverend uncle.

Charles Honeyman passed the pew.
"An odor of millefleurs rustled by them as
hair was parted down the middle, short in
. . His
front, and curling delicately round his ears.
head on one side, and two slim fingers in the
When the music began, he stood with
book."

maker's, it will be remembered, were fabulous,
Honeyman's bills at the tailor's and boot-
and took a great slice out of Colonel New-
come's savings to pay. The ever-beloved and

delightful "F. B." thus disposes of Honey

man:

"Saving your presence, Clive Newcome, and with every respect for the youthful bloom of your young heart's affections, your uncle, Charles Honeyman, sir, is a bad lot."

In "Shirley" the effeminate Mr. Donne flees fainting from the onset of Tartar, and bolts himself into a bedroom from which he calls aloud to be rescued.

But the sine qua non of the fictitious clergyman is his total inability to make love. Mr. Smirke in "Pendennis" declares his passion for Helen to his landlady, and even to young Pen, but gets no further. When a curate, in a novel, attempts to offer himself in marriage, he is merely being butchered to make a Roman holiday. His ponderous and didactic vocabulary trips, tangles, and finally overthrows him. Witness the language of Mr. Gibson in "He Knew He Was Right":

"I thought that perhaps I might take this opportunity of expressing- But after all, the levity of the moment is hardly in accordance with the sentiments which I should wish to express. . . . Do you not think it a duty that people should marry?”

cruel pen that wrote him down, over and above all this, as having "damp hands"! It requires a long reperusal of Dr. Primrose to wash away the memory of Mr. Slope.

George Eliot, who might have been expected to deride the priestly character, gave us instead the pleasant portraits of Mr. Farebrother in "Middlemarch" and Dr. Kenn in "The Mill on the Floss." The latter is affectionately described as having "a plain middle-aged face, with a grave penetrating kindness in it." Thus the freethinker; while Miss Austen, in her own father's rectory in Hampshire, was plotting the absurdities of Mr. Collins!

The immortal Vicar has, to my mind, but one rival, and that is Dominie Sampson. That gaunt and shuffling form, in its ill-fitting rusty suit, bears a kind of dim resemblance to our great Emancipator. At his self-forgetting fidelity, though somewhat learnedly expressed, who can smile? or who can think young Bertram, or young Hazeldean (both well enough in their way), fit to inhabit the same novel with such a Greatheart as the Dominie?

In Americans a sort of Plymouth Rock reverence for the cloth has long survived; nor, I think, does it show any sign of weakening.

Mr. Collins thus declares himself to Eliza- "The Sky Pilot" and "Black Rock" make beth Bennet:

"I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish. . . . And you should take it into consideration that in spite of your manifold attractions it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you."

(Fie, fie, Miss Austen!)

Mr. Trollope, too, is the object of an especial grievance on my part. In "Barchester Towers," that apotheosis of the clergyman, what unmanly rancor he pours out upon the head of Mr. Slope! Is it not enough to give that wretched man a glistening forehead, "lumpy" hair, and "thin and bloodless lips"?-not enough to say, with concentrated malice, that men didn't like him, though women often did? This is barely endurable. But the

amends, I trow, for many a "curate with pink eyes." Mr. Owen Wister has celebrated another type of cleric, in his Bishop of the plains, who wins the confidence of the Virginian, and speaks the word in season to Lin McLean. Better known than either Mr. Wister's Bishop or Mr. Connor's Sky Pilot, is the endeared Dr. Lavendar of Mrs. Deland's "Old Chester Tales." Reader! hast thou met that wise old minister?-Not at his best unless thou hast seen him about his shrewd, humorous, patient, Christian task in that great story of "The Note"-the wisest piece of philosophy (I think) yet issued from Old Chester.

By the bye, will not Mr. Cable, Mr. Wister, or the author of "Nathan Burke" sometime portray for us the fox-hunting parson of old Virginia?

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ART INSTITUTIONS IN THE UNITED American Water Color Society of New York

STATES

N the "Field of Art" for November, 1896, was given a brief account of the origin and subsequent development of some of the more important institutions, museums, societies, schools, etc., in this country, but in the course of fifteen years the further growth of that interest in the fine arts, in nearly all their branches, which was then noted as promising has become phenomenal, if we may believe present-day records. As the start was made ab nihilo―an Eastern portrait painter of the last generation has recorded the statement of one of his sitters, from a thriving Western community, that none of his fellow-citizens had a work of art “worth more than five dollars, and if he has anything in color, it's a chromo"-this growth is encouraging. Art museums, societies and schools, galleries for exhibitions, have multiplied greatly under the spur of this laudable civic pride, and the relapses have been few and, generally, temporary. An overconfidence in the future and an underestimate of the financial drain have sometimes led to periods of suspension; in the desire to secure the best examples, without duly considering the taste of the local purchasers, an agent has been despatched to make the tour of the more important art centres and solicit the loan of pictures and small works of sculpture, and the cost of packing, shipping and insuring, exhibiting and returning, has demanded a larger number of purchases and subscriptions than were always forthcoming. It is only to the largest and most important exhibitions, as those of Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Buffalo, and Chicago, that the painters and sculptors are willing to pay their own freight if their works have not been selected by a jury, and to this expense is to be added the risk, or rather the certainty, of damage in transit.

An important feature in this establishment of a healthy circulation has been the sending out of "rotary" collections, frequently selected from an annual exhibition in an Eastern city. These are usually limited to small pictures, at moderate prices, or small bronzes for the sculptures, and the sales have been, generally, sufficiently numerous to justify the enterprise, about one-fifth of the whole. The VOL. L.-24

reported that its fifth rotary collection, that of 1909-10, was shown in the following cities: St. Louis, Buffalo, Columbia, Mo.; Pittsburg, Grand Rapids, Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, Chicago, and Jackson, Mich.; and that applications from the following had to be declined because dates could not be arranged: Kansas City, Utica, Erie, Pa.; Minneapolis, Youngstown, O.; Louisville, Nashville, Baltimore, Omaha, Saginaw, Palo Alto, and Long Beach, Cal. In theory, each local institution receiving one of these collections for exhibition in its gallery sends a catalogue and a report to the parent society and a catalogue to each exhibitor, but it has been known to happen that these measures were neglected and that neither the officers of the home society nor the individual exhibitors knew for some time where the "rotary" was.

The American Art Annual for 1910-11 enumerates 944 art museums, art societies, and art schools as against 403 in 1907. This volume gives a brief account of 280 museums and art societies in the United States, a list of 102 art schools with a total registration of 31,700 and a list tabulating the answers received from 170 colleges and universities maintaining courses in the history of art and giving 5,877 as the number of students receiving instructions in this course and 7,751 as the number who had worked in the studios. Of the art schools, the records show 57 as strictly professional, giving instruction in drawing, modelling, and painting from the antique and from life. Instruction in design is given in 56 schools, 39 of which report also classes in the various crafts, such as bookbinding, pottery, and metal work. While the United States lack "the well-organized industrial schools that are such a strong factor in Germany, France, and England," the teaching of manual training and of æsthetics in the elementary and secondary and public schools has, nevertheless, "grown very rapidly." This, naturally, has led to e establishment of n al art schools for ne training of teachers in this work, and of these the records show 39 art schools with normal courses, the registration of which in 28 was 1,928. The summer schools play an important part in the training of teachers, and the evening schools of students.

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