hands with the bereaved family and made doleful reminders, with long faces, of just what the victims were trying to forget, and tempered the severity of their discourse by speculating hopefully on the whereabouts of the departed spirit.

The number and variety of amusements in our village were surprising. There were even practical jokes, intended to point a moral or correct an objectionable habit, as when the sons of the congressman, in protecting their only sister from the approach of the half-witted youth, who pumped the organ and proposed to all the girls, received him at the gate with a pail of water, followed by a pan of flour.

In our village and in all the community surrounding the village there was not a family that was not of good old New England stock except the congressman's. It was an American village in an American community in which not a single foreign-born person had yet arrived. It was a community of contentment and serene confidence in its future just before the first telegraph wire came over the surrounding hills leading the advance of the procession of electrical discoveries that were to fuse the round world into one vast community for evil and for good.

The blacksmith hammered at his anvil, shod the horses of the farmers, and set the tires of wagon-wheels in a circle of burning fagots outside the door; the doctor drove his rounds over the country roads, taking his fees in butter and eggs; the shoemaker, sitting low in his leather seat, hammered on his last and drove his awl and extended his arms in a cross as he patched the shoe of the urchin in stocking feet who was stealing his wax for chewing-gum; the rector wrote sermons in his study and attended to the spiritual needs of the parish, and if he buried one, he married two, and lived frugally on his small salary, which was supplemented by an annual donation; John Pierpont pumped the organ on Sunday, and drove the cows to pasture, listening through the dust to the crackling hoofs of the herd, and, to hasten his wooing, proposed to two girls in one letter; and the storekeeper,

who boarded at the tavern, to be grand, at two dollars a week when he could have lived at the rectory for twelve shillings, measuring calico and weighing codfish behind his cool counter, was the envy of the farm boys who toiled in the sun, and sometimes they lingered in the seductive coolness while their horses, goaded by the flies, stamped and pawed in the hollow places by the hitching-blocks; the tavernkeeper sat behind his register, with a quill pen reposing in a tumbler of bird shot, listening for the first sound of the stagehorn announcing his coming guests; the farmers worked out their road tax in the spring with plow and harrow and scraper and hoe, one day for a man and two for a team and one for a scraper, and built bridges in the hollows and "thank-youma'ams" on the hillsides: and so things went on in the community of contentment from day to day and from year to year until one historic morning a stranger got out of the stage.

He was a brawny man, with big fists and sinewy arms, in a drab greatcoat having a graduated series of small capes at the shoulder, and he had a curious twinkle

Yorkshire. There had been rumors of a foreign correspondence on the part of the shoemaker, who was now the postmaster as well, and there are boys now living who stood on tiptoe to look through the delivery-window or mounted on one another's shoulders to peep through an empty letter-box at the yellow English guineas, sorted and counted and stacked up in golden chimneys on the shoemaker's table.

The shoemaker retired with his British. gold to a neighboring city, and the brawny immigrant with the sinewy arms built a blacksmith shop and took his stand behind the anvil, with his son at the bellows. No one minded his coming but the blacksmith at the other end of the street; yet the great outside world had struck our village a body blow. The farmers brought their horses and wagons to the new shop for better service at cheaper rates. The new smith took a family pew in the church, chinked his coin on the pewter plate, and waited. Within a year the native blacksmith, whose face, by the way, had never been seen in church, like the shoemaker, disappeared from the village.

The potato crop was bad in Ireland, and America sent flour by the shipload and brought back the starving people for ballast, who came as workmen on the farms, and soon the Irish brogue was heard for the first time in our village. One English navvy came in hobnailed shoes and corduroys, destitute of everything but a brood of open mouths, like young birds in a nest. It was vacationtime, and his family was given shelter and food in the school-house, and the village children, who had been born in ancestral homes, however humble, and ate at table from family delft with silver. spoons of another generation, gathered about the door of the school-house to wonder at other children seated on bundles of canvas and bed-ticking about an ironbound chest for a table. The new world was just as strange to them. The father was crippled, rumor said, by tramping on a tread-mill, and after his first day's work. on a farm, he started in the early sum

mer evening to return to his family in the school-house, with salt pork and bread in the slack of his slop, when he was attacked by fireflies, which he mistook for "lantern men," and lost his provisions as he stumbled and fell in his flight.

Imperceptibly, but steadily, with the arrival of aliens and the approach of the railway, the tide set in against our village. A railway station was located five miles away, and the Concord stages, with the galloping horses and the merry horn, were taken off the road, and succeeded by a one-horse trap. The business of the tavern dwindled for want of guests, and the pen, which was now a steel pen, grew rusty in the tumbler of bird shot, while the landlord dozed on the porch from year to year, until he slept in longer naps, undisturbed by the school-boys, who crawled about underneath, searching for pennies, a business that had been profitable in stagetimes, but which, like some modern enterprises, went into bankruptcy in sympathy with its business connections.

The stage barns took a sympathetic lurch with the tottering business of the tavern, and the long row of stalls where the vicious leaders had rattled their halter chains and looked back with bloodshot eyes and slanted ears at the man with the currycomb, were now deserted slips where the hens hatched their broods in the mangers, with heads turned to bring one eye to bear on the lean rats that scampered over the straw. In the stable-yard were broken. wagons, the iron work gathering rust in the rain and the sun, and abandoned fanning-mills, the property of the stage company, and cutting-boxes with single knives, set at a guillotine-slant, under which the heads of the oat-sheaves had fallen into the basket, to be devoured by the horses, and red pools of stagnant water stood in the cart-ruts.

The departed stages had left a trail of depression and decay in their wake, which settled first on the tavern and its outbuildings; but under the contagion of bad business our village itself was soon dozing. 'The church was unable to maintain a rector, and the congressman read the ser

chancel-table or inserting the knife in the throat of a stupid porker. Some of the parishioners had already gone away, and their places had been filled by strange faces. The village doctor was enjoying at larger practice in the country town, and the historian had transferred his activities to the house of his publishers in Franklin Square.

John Pierpont still pumped the organ, Mr. Swann faced the music, and the father of the oval-faced daughters with blond curls stood his riding-whip in his hat in the pew behind him and rubbed up his curly gray hair for the benefit of the ladies and prepared to listen to the congressman.

When the services ceased altogether, it was John Pierpont who took to the road, prayer-book in hand, tramping two miles to the north to be present at a morning service, and then walking an equal distance to the south to an afternoon sermon in a Methodist church.

IN the fullness of time the great war came to find the congressman ranged

went up in smoke, and a plain farm-house took its place, with no fence to protect its sheds and stacks and farming implements and muddy wagons from the public gaze. The two houses facing the church, with lilac-bushes at the front gate and flowerbordered walks, disappeared, and so did the unused store, and the conical cedars planted by the historian had grown into tall trees that overtopped the church tower, from which the spire had fallen. The village street was not grass-grown, for it was a part of the highway between two county towns, but fields had advanced to its border over the gardens and housesites and the lawns where the gentle game of battledore and shuttlecock had been played. The post-office had been removed to a neighboring town, and in its stead there were tin boxes fixed against the fences in front of the few remaining houses, or nailed to the hitching-post, where there was no fence, and these were visited once a day by a licensed mailcarrier in a two-wheeled cart.

If the ghost of the old stage-coach had passed over the hill on moonlight nights,

with muffled hoof-beats and silent horn, the churchyard would have risen up to see it pass, and the tavern-keeper would have strayed as far as his rickety porch from force of habit; but, alas! the ghosts of our village would have been hard put to it to find their own tombstones, since the sacred mounds, the gentle hillocks of the dead, had been plowed up by the vandal alien. and leveled into a dreary lawn where the strawberries refuse to grow.

In this area of desolation, which was all that survived of our village, John Pierpont remained the last inhabitant, bent with age, watching the traffic of the cross

road from behind the potted geraniums in the recessed porch, which, like a good son, he watered and cared for in memory of his mother. He was a feeble old man who had never married because all the girls were in a league against him, and many of whom he had buried, for he has long been the village sexton. He no longer digs the graves. Even that office is performed by an alien; but he is present. at all burials, and it is sometimes his duty to welcome an old member of the congregation, come back to our village in the only way a villager, having once gone away, ever came back.

N this article we pass to the schools of the Netherlands. Here our first example is from a Dutch master of the late sixteenth century, Hendrik Goltzius (1555-1618), a painter-engraver widely famous in his day and a craftsman of high power, which was to a large extent misused. Goltzius lived in the age when the sincere native art of the Low Countries had lost its way and become ridiculous in the attempt to ape the graces and sublimities of the Renaissance in Italy. His designs, intended to be in the spirit of Michelangelo, are to modern eyes bombastic and absurd beyond measure. But he was like many

other artists of his time and country in that only one half of him was Italianate and false, namely, the high-flying and academic half; the other half, which dealt with immediate facts and especially with portraiture, remained sincere and master

ly. Nothing can well be more faithful and incisive in the rendering of structure and of character, and at the same time in soberer taste, than the sheet with three studies in silver point of a single male head, here reproduced from the Malcolm Collection in the British Museum (Fig. 15); and it is typical of much that was done by this master and by others of the same time and school. The material, silver point, is, of course, one which ad