army sitting around with its feet in every man's fireplace, everything jumbled together. The French, my word! they have to get on or smother."

"Yes, you always lay it to that, don't you?" said my friend. "I don't know."

"Did you ever hear the story of the Mayor of X-?" I asked him.

He

My friend had never heard it. knew Belgium as no other American dreamed of knowing it. He knew the church with the Irish priest from Chicago, and how to pass the étape line at Tamise without being caught. He knew the leg ends of the stone "military bridge" at Tournai, how old the round tower was, and where you found the guide who let you into the tapestry room of the cathedral. He knew the trick of unloading rice on the commission's docks, all about milling percentages, how to swear in Flemish, and what you had to do when you met the cardinal at Mechlin. He knew myriads of bobbing little streets in the lower city at Brussels, what their names meant, and who had written delicious stories about them. He knew restaurants where they cooked fish so the savor of it fairly maddened you, and he could take you to a café speckled with blue and white tiles. and possessed of a clock which was able and willing to play seven different tunes. He knew the spire where Ulenspiegel had been hoisted to scour for the enemy, and he knew how to tell when a baker was putting too much water into his bread. He knew about the north of France, too. He knew so many of those things because he loved human beings and just plain life, and because, though he was ever so wise, wore a tail-coat sometimes, and all that, he had never really grown up. I think there was nothing in all the occupied regions my friend did n't know about except the story of the Mayor of X. That he had never heard.

muniqué. Then you would proceed no further, and I should never have a chance to tell about the mayor and just what it was he replied to the German captain.

The Mayor of X- had other troubles to support besides the simple fact of the invasion. He had car-loads of food rolling upon him from Brussels and the responsibility of distributing it well to thousands of people. He had sometimes news that maybe no more cars of food would be sent, and that was worse. There were also his committees, so many and so variously arranged that if you tried to make a chart of them, it would look like the genealogy of the Carolingians in Lavisse's "History of France," only more complicated. Further than that, the Mayor of X had reports to receive and ponder and forward. Reports! Why, they galloped along in cavalcades! The mayor lived through all the centuries during which the war has been fought, far off in a city where he could hear the guns storming every day, and where a mayor's authority and dignity were just as important as the back door of a German Kommandantur slamming shut on one hinge. The mayor used to think of all those things from time to time. Occasionally I believe he lay awake till the night was desperately old and frail with dawn. Then when he was tossing into some shaggy, lowering sleep he heard the eternal cars of flour rumbling over his forehead. Or were those the guns growling out their endless, ugly threats? Car-loads of reports or guns shooting wheat into his face. The mayor sometimes wondered whether it was better to sleep or to wake. I don't believe it ever occurred to him that it might be better to die. He was a fine broad-shouldered mayor, with a tremendous thick beard and blue eyes.

very

Of course there were the others with him in all those devious businesses. There were particularly the German officer and the American delegate.

The American delegate, sometime student at Harvard, had a square jaw and a stray smile. In its own inexplicable fashion that smile seemed to hint that at least

But

once the German Army of Occupation had failed completely to overawe. the mayor and the delegate could see each other only occasionally; the latter had to live with his specially assigned German officer. The theory was that the American had been sent to watch the food and the German officer to watch the American.

This German captain himself wore a big, bald front, and loved to dabble about the committee office and confer with the mayor regarding this, that, or the other consignment of beans. Sometimes he and the mayor and the American delegate I would hold forth for hours on a vexed question, such as the most modern and efficacious methods of destroying tin cans. If you are a novice you may possibly suppose that a tin can contains nothing after it has been emptied. Which is not the fact, however. The emptiest of tin cans were swollen with potentialities in the north of France, or at least that is what some statesman in England believed. The statesman's imagination surged vigorously against the possibility of the Germans making hand-grenades of empty milk-tins. News would at once be telegraphed the mayor that no more condensed milk could be sent for the children. Fortunately, however, there always, followed two days later, a statement that the milk shipments would continue if assurance could be offered as to the complete extirpation of the tins. Then the mayor and the German captain and the American delegate would take counsel. Occasionally they decided to hire twenty men to do nothing between that day and the final lapse of eternity but tap milk-cans with sledge-hammers. Or again they would mull over the fascinating project of vaporizing the cans in a blast-furnace. Days when he was most tired the mayor was almost ready to acquiesce in the German officer's proposal-to ship all the cans to England and deposit them on the country place of the particular statesman in question.

After he said that the German officer always polished his spacious brow till it glistened as glistened nothing else in the

And he

world except his own boots. grinned. He had lived in London, and would tell you confidentially, any time after the Burgundy, that he preferred it to X. Over the liqueurs and coffee he once announced wistfully that he wished he were at the very moment in London. The mayor thought of remarking that the wish could not fail to evoke a certain modicum of sympathy in divers quarters. Then he remembered that the officer had promised to buy the district some seed potatoes in Holland; so he merely sipped his curaçao and smiled.

The captain was really several times removed from the most disagreeable person in the world. He always addressed the mayor as "monsieur," abstained from bawling at people when he was angry, and never rode a bicycle into the pond around the fountain. That feat, performed periodically by a tipsy young lieutenant of the establishment, rankled in the mayor's heart perhaps more than even he himself realized. The house and garden had belonged to one of his old, to one of his rare old, friends. It was a friend who had gone; he was no longer there. That is to say, he had been shot in the invasion.

But, at any rate, by some juggling of circumstances they all made their way up one day and down another, and the mayor never replied anything at all to the German officer till the occasion of the dinner at Maubeuge.

Nobody remembers just how they all happened to go to Maubeuge. Maybe it' was a mill to be partitioned or neutralized or something, or a question of railroad delays. They were there—that is the nub of it, dining in state at the house of one of the committee members. The mayor and the American delegate and the German officer were present. There was a similar representation from headquarters. One or two of the Maubeuge committee filled in odd gaps, with the inevitable sprinkling of loose Kommandants and meandering lieutenants. Plainly enough, it was a mixed company, the stuff of eventualities.

It was long and prepossessing, the din

ner, the sort of dinner a wealthy man can provide even in a country menaced with famine. The guests slid over their oysters into a trackless confusion of dishes and bottles so numerous that one could scarcely tell whether they were marching along side by side or one after the other. A good Chablis ministered gently to the first few convulsions of the conversation, and before the meat had been taken off every one was sailing his bark of persiflage merrily across the tops of the claret-glasses. The German captain stroked a bottle affectionately and decided outright it was a shame to make war upon a people who understood wine as did the French. The American delegate ventured a story, and those who could appreciate its flavor vowed they felt better for the laugh. The host permitted himself to recount an amusing incident at the expense of the local Kommandant, who was not of the number. Every one chortled. Then two lieutenants began to twit an American because his officer, another absentee, had fat legs. The German captain appealed jocularly to the mayor to aid him in restoring order.

By the time the second liqueur was being served the clustering cigar smoke had become tinged with a faint hue, color of rose. The occasion was patently developing. One of the Americans had already put on a German helmet, and discussion was rife as to whether, if he stood on his head, the spike would hold to the floor. A lieutenant was undertaking to sing a ribald English ditty. Internationalism, if not walking abroad, was at least sprawled in numerous easy-chairs.

And the German captain felt a whole troop of bubbles-mixed bubbles of champagne and sentimentality-effervescing inside him.

He leaned over to the mayor, and his argument seemed to be something in this vein:

"Monsieur le Maire, we 're enemies, you and I. Countries at war; no way out of that, you know. They say that down in the trenches you can sometimes hear the people at Paris cursing Germany. But

with us, between you and me, that does n't count so much, does it? For instance, if I should come back to see you after the war, you'd receive me just as now, would n't you?"

It had been a long, hard dinner. The claret had flown over the Chablis, and had in turn surrendered despairingly to the Burgundy and champagne. The liqueurs were cutting their own personal capers atop the whole fabric of vintages, and the mayor sensed a little tingling and itching along his veins. He had a feeling in his toes that the top of his head was going to fly off. He gazed at the German officer, inhaled a monster puff of cigar smoke, and hunched his head forward ever so slightly. A silence slipped through the door, over the servant's shoulder, and filtered through the room under cover of the smoke. And the mayor replied

"What did the mayor reply?" urged my friend, sitting opposite me in the compartment.

I fixed my friend sternly.

"And the mayor replied, 'In the name of God, NEVER!'

"And he brought down his fist—it was a big French fist-with such a terrific thwack that the bottles leaped in astonishment, and the plates all clambered distractedly one over the other."

"And-" insisted my friend. The crazy little moonlight was sneaking through the window and twinkling mischievously on his gray mustache.

He

"And the German officer was so crestfallen that he rose right up and left. took the train to Brussels, and did n't come back at all for at least three days."

Nothing was heard except the snicketysnack of the car-wheels wrangling interminably with the track.

"And," I continued-"and even now if you say 'Never!' suddenly to the captain, he cavorts and fidgets like a child when you shout 'Boo!' in the dark.”

"Oh, my dear old chap, really!" My friend's teeth gleamed all round his pipe

stem.

"Well, maybe I can't vouch for that part," I had to admit grudgingly.

A

ND now to consider our reproductions, derived chiefly, as I have said, from the Heseltine collection and partly from others, both public and private; it will be convenient to take them in order of schools, beginning with the Italian, and going on with the German, Flemish, the Dutch, French, and English. Naturally, I have not attempted to illustrate any of the schools systematically or at large, but only to give examples of the work of a particular master or group of masters within each school as the materials might be most readily available.

Among the Italians our examples shall be drawn from two art centers only, Florence and Parma, and shall include none

of the primitives, properly so called, though nothing is more fascinating than their study. The earliest master to be represented will be Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and for him we must go outside the Heseltine collection. By date this mighty artist and sage belongs to the group of later Florentine primitives, Perugino, Botticelli, and the rest, but by genius and achievement to the full and free Renaissance. His hand-"that ineffable left hand," as a contemporary calls it, for it was with the left he chiefly worked-is distinguished above all others, whatever was the material he employed and for whatever purpose, for the combination of fiery energy with rhythmic charm of touch. The thousands of scien