thing about slippers and tea. Little pots simmered on the hobs, there were muffins hot from the grate, jam, and Devonshire cream. Soon coziness became drowsiness, and hanging our garments one by one-a final demand of the system-on the knobs of our small beds, we climbed gladly aboard those nocturnal barks. My bed is like a little boat had yet to be written; but even without it, and with the aid of our combined imaginations, we had, I am sure, all the thrill of those who definitely embark. Alas! the day was soon to come, in the midst of this happy life, when we should embark indeed. We were told that we were to leave England and go to America, where our dear relatives lived, of whom, naturally, we had only a dim idea. The call of the blood is not very strong when it comes to one diluted by an ocean, and when one has lived all one's short life scarcely aware of it. These transatlantic cousins seemed as fantastic to us as Finlanders, Sinbad the Sailor, or Eskimos living in ice and fur. They spoke our language, we knew, though it would have been no surprise to us to learn that they did not. At these tidings, the overturn of all our world, we went about in a daze of bewildered grief, cherishing everything we held dear in a heartbroken attempt to realize that we were soon to leave it forever: our pets, the garden paths, the special pussy that was allowed to sleep on the table in the library window, the Avon winding through its fields, the tall gates in our wall. On the morning that we drove for the last time through these gates, behind a William scarcely recognizable, so changed was his faithful face with sorrow, a last glimpse of that pussy stretched asleep on her table, with her white paws in the sunshine, did more to bring on the storm of tears that I had been laboring to hold back than the thought of all other charms of English life. I did love that pussy so! As a kindly attempt at consolation on the part of our elders, we were allowed to take our carrier-pigeons with us on our journey to Liverpool. Each of us was to write a note to a selected person at home, attach it to our birds' necks, and let them fly away. It seemed a fearful risk. Folding my note feverishly tight, I fastened it to my pigeon -such a funny little pipe of a neck, down in his feathers!-while he rustled his wings in alarm against the paper lining of the basket. As the train slowed down for a lone station in that wide north country, a window was opened for us, and with a toss up went our two pets into the air. They circled about for a moment, and then, to our vast relief, struck off together, straight southward. Leaning far out of the compartment window, with a parental clutch upon us in the rear, we watched them, with all our hearts in our eyes, till they were mere specks on a cloudless sky. They vanished. Blindly we lapsed backward upon the cushions; our train puffed stolidly on its way. Detail from "The Lace-maker" By GABRIEL METSU (See frontispiece to this number) NATION fares ill without an ideal, and Holland of the seventeenth century, newly formed into a nation, found hers in the confidence in her own destiny, founded not upon vague aspirations, but upon actual achievements at home and abroad in every known field of intellectual, industrial, and commercial activity. It is this ardent life of the people that is mirrored in the painting of the period. Its truth of portraiture is the reason of its abiding interest, and the fact that its craftsmanship involves the same integrity of purpose and intensive skill which had enhanced all the standards of living is the secret of its merit. The Dutch painters, as a school, were honest and consummate craftsmen. In the portraiture of the national life Gabriel Metsu occupied his special field. It was the intimacies of the home life of the well-to-do burghers that he betrayed with peculiar tact and geniality. It would seem from the few surviving particulars of his career that he was early recognized as an accomplished painter, and when he moved from his birthplace, Leyden, and settled in Amsterdam, he received there the rights of citizenship, and soon enjoyed good social standing in the community. His self-portrait, now at Buckingham Palace, shows a well-dressed man, with pleasant, intelligent face; shrewd, humorous gaze; strong, expressive hands; and a general air of easy elegance. In fact, he looks to have been himself a feature of the society that he charmingly recorded. It is always some simple incident of family routine that he portrays, as, in the present instance, a lady seated at her tambour, looking away for a moment from her nimble fingers and dainty bobbins to watch, perhaps, her child at play. As usual with Metsu, the simplicity of the incident is echoed in the terse and telling way of treating it. The lady's figure is the heart of the story; satin and fur and velvet garnish it, while the face and the area occupied by her hands and work supply the notes of piquant intimacy. The setting is of the simplest: a mirror to interrupt the plainness of the wall, and in the original-for the present picture is only a detail-a curtained window, and a very homely-looking cat perched upon a foot-warmer. This tact of taste that instinctively chooses a few details, and disposes them in due relation of subordination to the main theme, is characteristic of Metsu, and is charmingly suggested in Timothy Cole's engraving. In addition one must imagine a limpidity of color and fluent ease of brush-work, qualities that have secured for Metsu so high a place among the little masters of Holland genre. CHARLES H. CAFFIN. THE CAREY PRINTING CO. INC. NEW YORK Decoration for memorial altar for St. Luke's Church, Baltimore, Maryland From a painting by R. M'Gill Mackall NTHONY ARDEN closed his eyes; he was trying to let the unutterable misery of two years slip from him. It was over; it was all over, as over as an extracted tooth, but he could not yet feel relief or exultation. These feelings must come later, when he saw England. When he closed his eyes he escaped seeing the very fat, red neck, passing without gradation into the round-shaped head, of his German guard. In two hours he would be over the frontier into Holland and have no guard. He kept saying to himself, "Free! free! free!" The word sounded perfectly meaningless. Fears assailed him; he was quite used to fears, ordinary fears about food, vermin, a bullying sergeant, or the collapse of a fellowprisoner. These were reasonable fears; the new kind were n't. They were too much like hopes; they were really terrible. He had never been one of the men who collapsed, but he knew all about collapses. He had fought them as St. Paul fought with the beasts at Ephesus. He knew their beginnings, the ominous vacillations of the will, when a man would wait for a quarter of an hour before deciding which foot to put his boot on. This would be the prelude to a fearful lethargy. Anthony had watched the restlessness of the driven body before the mind suddenly ceased to drive it; the rush and flutter of the helpless thoughts till the interludes came; the blank spaces when the thoughts subsided, and the thinker, exhausted, overwrought, and trembling, would appeal to him for drugs. Bromide was useful if there was any tiding over to be done, but too often it edged stupor with despair, and one could seldom tide over the illimitable seas of prolonged imprisonment. Anthony was a wonderful hand at keeping people up. keeping people up. Even the Germans appreciated his power, and as they had by that time learned to prefer sane Copyright, 1919, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved. 289 |