one into the parlor when painted in connection with the above
purling brook and several shade trees.

Those who could not afford oil paintings went in for steel engravings
and chromos--good reliable brands, such as the steel engraving of Henry
Clay's Farewell to the American Senate and the Teaching Baby to Waltz
art chromo. War pictures were also very popular back in that period. If
it were a Northern household you could be pretty sure of seeing a work
entitled Gettysburg, showing three Union soldiers, two plain and one
colored, in the act of repulsing Pickett's charge. If it were a Southern
household there would be one that had been sold on subscription by a
strictly non-partisan publishing house in Charleston, South Carolina,
and guaranteed to be historically correct in all particulars,
representing Robert E. Lee chasing U. S. Grant up a palmetto tree, while
in the background were a large number of deceased Northern invaders
neatly racked up like cordwood.

Such things as these were a part of the art education of our early
youth. Along with them we learned to value the family photograph album,
which fastened with a latch like a henhouse door, and had a nap on it
like a furred tongue, and contained, among other treasures, the
photograph of our Uncle Hiram wearing his annual collar.

And there were also enlarged crayon portraits in heavy gold frames with
red plush insertions, the agent having thrown in the portraits in
consideration of our taking the frames; and souvenirs of the
Philadelphia Centennial; and wooden scoop shovels heavily gilded by hand
with moss roses painted on the scoop part and blue ribbon bows to hang
them up by; and on the what-not in the corner you were reasonably
certain of finding a conch shell with the Lord's Prayer engraved on it;
and if you held the shell up to your young ear you could hear the
murmur of the sea just as plain as anything. Of course you could secure
the same murmuring effect by holding an old-fashioned tin cuspidor up to
your ear, too, but in this case the poetic effect would have been
lacking. And, besides, there were other uses for the cuspidor.

Almost the only Old Masters with whose works we were well acquainted
were John L. Sullivan and Nonpareil Jack Dempsey. But Rosa Bonheur's
Horse Fair suited us clear down to the ground--her horses looked like
real horses, even if they were the kind that haul brewery wagons; and in
the matter of sculpture Powers' Greek Slave seemed