ing
was, as it had been during his life, of pride in his great fame and in the
celebrated people who had come to see him.

This pride warmed into something like affection when the day after his
death, came the tidings that he had bequeathed to his college the Gino
Sprague Falleres portrait of himself. Of course, at that time, no one in
Middletown had seen the picture, for the philosopher's sudden death had
occurred, very dramatically, actually during the last sitting. He had, in
fact, had barely one glimpse of it himself, as, according to Falleres's
invariable rule no one, not even the subject of the portrait, had been
allowed to examine an unfinished piece of work. But though Middletown had
no first-hand knowledge of the picture, there could be no doubt about the
value of the canvas. As soon as it was put on exhibition in London, from
every art-critic in the three nations who claimed Falleres for their own
there rose a wail that this masterpiece was to be buried in an unknown
college in an obscure village in barbarous America. It was confidently
stated that it would be saved from such an unfitting resting-place by
strong action on the part of an International Committee of Artists; but
Middletown, though startled by its own good fortune, clung with Yankee
tenacity to its rights. Raphael Collin, of Paris, commenting on this in
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, cried out whimsically upon the woes of an
art-critic's life, "as if there were not already enough wearisome
pilgrimages necessary to remote and uncomfortable places with jaw-breaking
names, which must nevertheless be visited for the sake of a single
picture!" And a burlesque resolution to carry off the picture by force was
adopted at the dinner in London given in honor of Falleres the evening
before he set off for America to attend the dedicatory exercises with
which Middletown planned to install its new treasure.

For the little rustic college rose to its one great occasion. Bold in
their confidence in their dead colleague's name, the college authorities
sent out invitations to all the great ones of the country. Those to whom
Gridley was no more than a name on volumes one never read came because
the portrait was by Falleres, and those who had no interest in the world
of art came to honor the moralist whose noble clear-thinking had
simplified the intimate problems of modern life. There was the usual
residuum of those who came because the others did, and, also as usual,