, a
good citizen by intention, an affectionate son and brother, and
already a pretty good painter of the saner species.

A modest income of his own enabled him to bide his time and decline
pot-boilers. A comparatively young father and an even more youthful
mother, both of sporting proclivities, together with a sister of the
same tastes, were his preferred companions when he had time to go home
to the family rooftree in northern New York. His lines, indeed, were
cast in pleasant places. Beside still waters in green pastures, he
could always restore his city-tarnished soul when he desired to retire
for a while from the battleground of endeavour.

The city, after all, offered him a world-wide battlefield; for Garret
Barres was by choice a painter of thoroughbred women, of cosmopolitan
men--a younger warrior of the brush imbued with the old traditions of
those great English captains of portraiture, who recorded for us the
more brilliant human truths of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.

From their stately canvases aglow, the eyes of the lovely dead look
out at us; the eyes of ambition, of pride, of fatuous complacency;
the haunted eyes of sorrow; the clear eyes of faith. Out of the past
they gaze--those who once lived--deathlessly recorded by Van Dyck,
Lely, Kneller; by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lawrence, Raeburn;
or consigned to a dignified destiny by Stuart, Sully, Inman, and
Vanderlyn.

* * * * *

When Barres returned to New York after many years, he found that the
aspect of the city had not altered very greatly. The usual dirt,
disorder, and municipal confusion still reigned; subways were being
dug, but since the memory of man runneth, the streets of the
metropolis have been dug up, and its market places and byways have
been an abomination.

The only visible excitement, however, was in the war columns of the
newspapers, and, sometimes, around bulletin boards where wrangling
groups were no uncommon sight, citizens and aliens often coming into
verbal collision--sometimes physical--promptly suppressed by bored
policemen.

There was a "preparedness" parade; thousands of worthy citizens
marched in it, nervously aware, now, that the Great Republic's only
mobile military division was on the Mexican border, where also certain
Guard regiments were likely to be directed to reinforce the
regulars--pet regiments from the city, among whose corps of officers
and enlisted men ev