T is difficult to define the charm of a day's riding in the West where the sun is hot, the country barren, the horses generally bad. It must be the simplicity, the touch of reality so prized by children in their play, the truth to circumstances, that distinguish it, as a pursuit, from showy meets of town and country clubs, anise-seed hunts, and masquerading of one sort or another in the saddle. One must go far to find the indispensable conditions: they are usually the reward of a rather bad time in other ways. The play must be played in earnest, not with an eye to spectators. If possible, it should be part of the business of one's life, yet only lately so, for novelty is one of the conditions; good company, and not too much of it, is another. One should start early in the morning, with serious intentions. The horses should know their business as well as the men, and for this reason the horses of the country are the best. If there is a woman in the party, she should return in spirit to her primitive condition of dependence upon direct masculine protection and leadership by the abandonment of her rights she will receive a corresponding measure of her privileges. There should be food in the saddlebags; for women cannot travel as men can, hour after hour without eating, however sure of their powers in this respect they may be at the start. Without food a woman's courage in the saddle, and frequently her temper, give out; and it is not wisdom on a journey to strain either the one or the other more than is necessary. An inevitable strain a woman will endure with dignity, while a trifling but needless one irritates her. There should be no definite picture of the country in the minds of the adventurers beyond such suggestions as the local names afford - Robie's Gulch, Sour-dough Dick's, the Idaho City road, the road to Silver Mountain. There should be some discomfort to remember with complacency when the ride is over, and the stages should be long enough to give the women of the party the simple pride of showing that they can keep the pace beside the men, with the odds against them of a side-saddle instead of a pair of stirrups. There should be important changes of scenery by the way, such as every few hundred feet of elevation will give in the West, from plain or treeless park to lightly wooded foothills; from these to the deep old timber upon the flanks of the range; and from this again to the crooked trees and dwarfish vegetation on the borders of the snow. But a journey from valley to valley across the divides between, if not so sensational, is more beautiful and less severe than a steady climb; for in every valley there will be a cabin or a ranch, if not a settlement, and the sight of new faces and strange interiors is part of the rest. Montaigne, who seems to have been one of the most sensible as well as (by his own account) hardiest of horsemen, says: "I have learnt to frame my journeyes after the Spanish fashion, all at once and outright, great or reasonable. And in extreme heats I travell at night, from sunne-set to sunne rising." It is impossible to read the mere statement and think of the countries he traversed in this manner without a vivid conception of his wisdom. No woman who has ridden in the blazing West but can sympathize with him when he says, "No weather is to me so contrary as the scorching heat of the parching sunne; for those umbrels or riding canopies which, since Copyright, 1889, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved. 3 the ancient Romans the Italians use, doe more weary the armes than ease the head." Have we not dreamed- all of us who are amateurs, and not proud, like the cowboy, of wearing upon our cheeks "the shadowed livery of the burnished sun"— of cool night marches during the season of unvarying weather, when Perseus is striding up the east, and Lyra the beautiful hangs like a lamp in the heavens? That lack of atmosphere which leaves the traveler at the sun's mercy by day gives wonderful brilliancy to the spectacle of the night sky. Soon after sunset the dry summer gale begins to blow; the stars "rush out"; the cloudless sky is dark as on frosty winter nights. Or if there be a moon, the breadth and tenderness of her light in a wide and treeless landscape will be a revelation to those who only know moonlight beset by shadows. All the night journeys in the fiction of one's early reading come back to revive the restlessness such nights will bring: Sir Kenneth, exiled from honor and slave of the Arab physician, looking back at the Crusaders' camp, at the tents and banners glimmering in the moonlight, as he rides away into the desert; Quentin Durward mustering his little troop of lances at the hour of midnight beneath the Dauphin's tower. The days of errant heiresses, of Lady Ediths in Palestine, are no more: the Kenneths and the Quentins are engaged in earning their individual livings, instead of guarding banners or convoying disguised ladies across unscientific frontiers. Yet there are nights of the dry season as haunting in their lonely beauty as the nights of Palestine or that hour of the rendezvous at the Dauphin's tower; there are stretches of uncelebrated country as lovely by moonlight as the Syrian desert or the majestic plain of the Loire. And there may be a man, now and then, in the West, though he rides a shock-haired cayuse instead of a stately war-horse, as brave in his way and as simply true as the young gentlemen to whom those important undertakings were intrusted so long ago. And it is to be hoped that such confidence as that of the noble ladies of Croye, who asked but the name of their knight, his degree, and one look at his face, may be ready when called for in the women of the West. ORCAGNA (ANDREA DI CIONE). (ITALIAN OLD MASTERS.) HATEVER difficulty there might be in determining the relative position of Giotto and Memmi, the contemporary chiefs of the Florentine and Sienese schools, through the unfortunate destruction of the work of the latter, there should be no question as to the rank of Orcagna; and if we do not put him higher than either of the other great painters mentioned, it is because the general progress of art had made it possible for him to do what a greater mind could not do in the state of the arts in which Giotto found them; and we might give him credit for what was due purely to the general development. But of all those who follow in the succession of time and work Orcagna stands, like Saul, head and shoulders above the crowdgreat in all the great qualities of art. Andrea di Cione was the second of four brothers, all architects, sculptors, or painters, though the others were incomparably his inferiors. During his lifetime he was always known as Arcagnolo, of which Orcagna is a corruption. He was at once painter, sculptor, architect, and master in every branch of art, 1308-1368. and had so thoroughly assimilated Giotto's great maxims that he took painting where that master left it and carried it on to new triumphs. Orcagna came to the front in a time when art had greatly degenerated in the hands of the Giottesques, and by recurring to the principles on which Giotto had founded his art, with the aid of all the light that the rival school of Siena threw upon it and a profoundly original insight into nature,- a healthy objective imagination, he raised his school from what seems like the Byzantine conventionalism of his immediate predecessors. This is the dangerous tendency of all subjective art, to drop into formalities and conventional iteration. Orcagna was by nature versatile, and had he lived in an era when nature asserted the influence over art which it exercised in the later schools, he certainly would have ranked among the greatest painters of that age. Vasari says that Stefano Fiorentino and Giottino surpassed Giotto in perspective; but Orcagna deserves this praise far more than they, for, owing to his studious scrutiny of Nature, he was better able to conquer the difficulties of rendering her. In his frescos we find the figure drawn and foreshortened with much boldness, and |