moved by some hidden cause. Back he would trot at once. Painter will want his picture," he said, "he has been waiting on in Venice just for this, and I must not keep him." Watkins turned up as we were getting into the cab to see Uncle Ezra off, and insisted upon accompanying us to the station. My wife took the opportunity to rub into him Flügel's remarks, which, at least, made Watkins out shady in chronology. At the station we encountered a new difficulty. The ticket collector would not let the pictures through the gate. My uncle expostulated in pure Tuscan. Watkins swore in Roman.

"Give him five lire, Mr. Williams." Poor Uncle Ezra fumbled in his pocketbook for the piece of money. He had never bribed in his life. It was a terrible moral fall, to see him tremblingly offer the piece of scrip. The man refused, "positive orders, permesso necessary,' etc., etc. The bell rang; there was a rush. Uncle Ezra looked unhappy.

"Here," Watkins shouted, grabbing the precious pictures in a manner far from reverent, "I'll send these on, Mr. Williams; run for your train." Uncle Ezra gave one undecided glance, and then yielded. "You will look after them," he pleaded, "carefully."

after the flurry of greetings was the impudent blue and red of Uncle Ezra's "Sancta Conversazione," Domenico Tintoretto, Savoldo, or what not; St. Agnes's leg and all beaming at us from the wall. The other two were not there. My wife looked at me. Maudie was making herself very gracious with little Watkins. Painter's solemn face began to lower more and more. Aunt Mary and Uncle Ezra industriously poured oil by the bucket upon the social sea.

At last Maud rose: "You must take me over there at once, Mr. Watkins. It will be such an enjoyment to have someone who really knows about pictures and has taste." This shot at poor Painter; then to my wife, “Come, Jane, you will like to see your room."

He

"Blast the pasteboards," Watkins put in under his breath, the best thing to do with them is to chop 'em up." was swinging them back and forth under his arm. My wife took them firmly from him. "He shall have his pictures, and not from your ribald hands."

A week later Rome became suddenly oppressively warm. We started off for Venice, Watkins tagging on incorrigibly, "I want to see 'Maud,'" he explained. The pictures had been packed and sent ahead by express. "The storm must have burst, tears shed, tempers cooled, mortification set in," I remarked as we were being shoved up the Grand Canal toward the Palazzo Palladio. "There they are in the balcony," my wife exclaimed, waving to us. Something is up; Maudie is hanging back with Aunt Mary, and Professor Painter is at the other end with Uncle Ezra."

66

The first thing that caught the eye

me for having been with her when she bought it, and having advised her and encouraged her to put six hundred dollars into it."

"Six hundred," I gasped.

I

"Well, I got bitten for about the same on my own account. I sha'n't get that Rachel's library at Berlin, that's all. The next time you catch me fooling in a subject where I don't know my bearings-like fine artYou see Mr. Williams found my picture one day when he was nosing about at an antichitàs, and thought it very fine. admire Mr. Williams tremendously, and I valued his opinion about art subjects much more then than I do now. He and Mrs. Williams were wild over it. They had just bought their picture, and they wanted us each to have one. They have lots of sentiment, you know?

"Lots," I assented.

Mrs. Williams got at me, and well, she made me feel that it would bring me nearer to Miss Vantweekle. You know she goes in for art, and she used to be impatient with me because I couldn't appreciate. I was dumb when she walked me up to some old Madonna, and the others would go on at a great rate. Well, in a word, I bought it for my education and I guess I have got it!

"Then the man, he's an old Jew on the Grand Canal, Raffman, you know him? He got out another picture, the Bonifazio. The Williamses began to get up steam over that, too. They hung over that thing Mr. Williams bought, that Savoldo or Domenico Tintoretto, and prowled about the churches and the galleries finding traces of it here in the style of this picture and that; in short we all got into a fever about pictures, and Miss Vantweekle invested all the money an aunt had given her before coming abroad in that Bonifazio.

"I must say that Miss Vantweekle held off some time, was doubtful about the picture; didn't feel that she wanted to put all her money into it. But she caught fire in the general excitement, and I may say "here a sad sort of conscious smile crept over the young professor's face"at that time I had a good deal of influence with her. She bought the picture, we brought it home, and put it up at the other end of the hall. We spent hours over that picture, studying out every line, placing every color. We made up our minds soon enough that it wasn't a Bonifazio, but we began to think—now don't laugh or I'll pitch you over the balcony it was an early work of Titian. There was an attempt in it for great things, as Mr. Williams said: no small man could have planned it. One night we had been talking for hours about them, and we were all pretty well excited. Mr. Williams suggested getting Watkins's opinion. Maud

Miss Vantweekle said, loftily, 'Oh! it does not make any difference what the critics say about it, the picture means everything to me;' and I, like a fool, felt happier than ever before in my life. The next morning Mr. Williams telegraphed you and set off."

66

Of

"A copy!' he said." Maud put in, Why, it's no more a copy than Titian's "Assumption." He could show us the very place in a palace on the Grand Canal where it had hung for four hundred years. course, all the old masters used the same models, and grouped their pictures alike. Very probably Titian had a picture something like it. What of that? He defied us to find the exact original."

"Well," I remarked, soothingly, "that ought to comfort you, I am sure. Call your picture a new Titian, and sell it when you get home."

"Mr. Watkins says that's an old trick,” moaned Maud, "that story about the palace. He says old Raffman has a pal among the Italian nobility, and works off copies through him all the time. I won't say anything about Uncle Ezra, he has been as kind and good as he can, only a little too enthusiastic. But Professor Painter !" She tossed her head.

The atmosphere in the Palazzo Palladio for the next few days was highly charged.

At dinner Uncle Ezra placidly made remarks about the Domenico Tintoretto, almost vaingloriously, I thought. "Such a piece of Venice to carry away. We missed it so much, those days you had it in Rome. It is so precious that I cannot bear to pack it up and lose sight of it for five months. Mary, just see that glorious piece of color over there."

Meantime some kind of conspiracy was on foot. Maud went off whole mornings with Watkins and Uncle Ezra. We were left out as unsympathetic. Painter wandered about like a sick ghost. He would sit glowering at Maud and Watkins, while they held whispered conversations at the other end of the hall. Watkins was the hero. He had accepted Flügel's judgment with impudent grace.

"A copy of Titian, of course," he said to me; "really it is quite hard on poor Miss Vantweekle. People, even learned people, who don't know about such things had better not advise. I have had the photographs of all Titian's pictures sent on, and we have found the original of your cousin's picture. Isn't it very like?"

It was very like; a figure was left out in the copy, the light was changed, but still it was a happy guess of Flügel.

Well, what are you going to do about it?" I said to Maud, who had just joined us. "Oh, Mr. Watkins has kindly consented to manage the matter for me; I believe he has a friend here, an artist, Mr. Hare, who will give expert judgment on it. Then the American vice-consul is a personal friend of Mr. Watkins, and also Count Corner, the adviser at the Academy. We shall frighten the old Jew, sha'n't we, Mr. Watkins?"

I walked over to the despised Madonna that was tipped up on its side, ready to be walked off on another expedition of defamation.

"Poor Bonifazio," I sighed, Maud, how can you part with a work of fine art that has meant so much to you?"

"Do you think, Jerome, I would go home and have Uncle Higgins with his authentic Rembrandt, and all his other pictures, laugh at me and my Titian? I'd burn it first."

I turned to Uncle Ezra. "Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened to this picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as brightly as ever, the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's soul: it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why it's like sending back the girl you married because her pedigree proved defective, or because she had lost her fortune. It's positively brutal!"

Maud darted a venomous glance at me ; however, I had put the judge in a hole.

"I cannot agree with you, Jerome." Uncle Ezra could never be put in a hole. "Maud's case is a very different one from Mr. Painter's or mine. We can carry back what we like personally, but for Maud to carry home a doubtful picture into the atmosphere she has to live in-why, it would be intolerable—with her uncle a connoisseur, all her friends owners of masterpieces." Uncle Ezra had a flowing style. "It would expose her to annoyance, to mortification-constant, daily. Above all to have taken a special gift, a fund of her aunt's, and to apply it in this mistaken fashion is cruel."

Painter remarked bitterly to me afterward, "He wants to crawl on his share of the responsibility. I'd buy the picture if I could raise the cash, and end the whole miserable business."

Indeed, Watkins seemed the only one blissfully in his element. As my wife remarked, Watkins had exchanged his interest in pictures for an interest in woman. Certainly he had planned his battle well. It came off the next day. They all left in a gondola at an early hour. Painter and I watched them from the balcony. After they were seated, Watkins tossed in carelessly the suspected picture. What went on at the antichità's, no one of the boatload ever gave away. Watkins had a hold on the man somehow, and the evidence of the fraud was overwhelming. noon they came back, Maud holding an enormous envelope in her hand.

About

"I can never, never thank you enough, Mr. Watkins," she beamed at him. "You have saved me from such mortification and unhappiness, and you were so clever."

That night at dinner Uncle Ezra was more than usually genial and beamed upon Maud and Watkins perpetually. Watkins was quite the hero and did his best to look humble.

"How much rent did the spiritual influence cost, Maud ?" I asked. She was too happy to be offended. "Oh, we bought an old ring to make him feel pleased, five pounds, and Mr. Hare's services were worth five pounds, and Mr. Watkins thinks we should give the viceconsul a box of cigars."

"Let's see; ten pounds and a box of cigars, that's 300 lire at the price of exchange. You had the picture just three weeks, a

THE sky-line of New York is changing so rapidly that the American traveller who goes abroad can recognize with more certainty the profiles of the foreign cities he approaches than that of his own metropolis as he sees it from the deck of the steamer on his return. It may be his first visit to Europe; he may know London, Rome, and Paris only from views of them in old prints. But, if he has an eye for such things, his first glimpse of St. Paul's, St. Peter's, or Notre Dame will tell him to what place he is coming, for all the world knows these pinnacles, has known them for centuries. They are as conspicuous and characteristic in the silhouettes of their cities as they were when they were built. One of the Dutch governors of New Amsterdam, seeking in spirit some familiar earthly habitation, might find old Amsterdam, for it cuts the same figure in the sky to-day that it did when he left it, but the last dead boss of New York, if by any chance he should get away from where he ought to be, would search the horizon in vain for the face of his city. The features his eye would seek are there: Old Trinity still stands, its steeple, like the spires of the old cathedrals, uplifted high above the earth; but its solitary prominence is gone. The modern office building has risen higher than the head of the cross, and the church VOL. XXII.-4

has lost its distinction. The enterprise of business has surpassed the aspiration of religion.

New York, in this, as in so many other things, is but the type of American cities. Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, even Washington-they all are rising bodily, constantly, fast, and their climbing sky-lines are writing with reckless realism across the heavens the same great story of material progress. It is time to read this writing of the walls. It may mean more than the increase of wealth, the growing power of capital, the might of skilled and disciplined labor. These have their own value, and have been the cause of national pride, but now they are the scapegoats of reactionary discontent. Men hate them. Is there nothing better back of these things?

The papers that have preceded this one have been answering the question. It was brains and character, the writers showed, that initiate, organize, and develop such enterprises as the department store, the modern hotel, the factory, and the bank ; and this is the story of the sky-lines. They do not tell it so simply as the other businesses, because they are less familiar, but they make it more conspicuous when told, and they leave it in a more enduring form. for the future to read. A great building