sers, I and a few others will still be holding out resolutely to the
end.

At such times as these I fain would send my thoughts back longingly to
an artist who flourished in the town where I was born and brought up. He
was practically the only artist we had, but he was versatile in the
extreme. He was several kinds of a painter rolled into one--house, sign,
portrait, landscape, marine and wagon. In his lighter hours, when
building operations were dull, he specialized in oil paintings of life
and motion--mainly pictures of horse races and steamboat races. When he
painted a horse race, the horses were always shown running neck and neck
with their mouths wide open and their eyes gleaming; and their nostrils
were widely extended and painted a deep crimson, and their legs were
neatly arranged just so, and not scrambled together in any old fashion,
as seems to be the case with the legs of the horses that are being
painted nowadays. And when he painted a steamboat race it would always
be the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee coming down the river abreast in
the middle of the night, with the darkies dancing on the lower decks and
heavy black smoke rolling out of the smokestacks in four distinct
columns--one column to each smokestack--and showers of sparks belching
up into the vault of night.

There was action for you--action and attention to detail. With this
man's paintings you could tell a horse from a steamboat at a glance. He
was nothing of an impressionist; he never put smokestacks on the
horse nor legs on the steamboat. And his work gave general satisfaction
throughout that community.

Frederic Remington wasn't any impressionist either; and so far as I can
learn he didn't have a cubiform idea in stock. When Remington painted an
Indian on a pony it was a regular Indian and a regular pony--not one of
those cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps on
to a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat on
the pony's hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your
nostrils. You could see the slide of the horse's withers and watch the
play of the naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like to enroll as a
charter member of a league of Americans who believe that Frederic
Remington and Howard Pyle were greater painters than any Old Master that
ever turned out blistered saints and fly-blown cherubim. And if every
one who secretly thinks the same way about it would only join in--of
course t