in that worthy but short-lived
organ of sublimity, "Le Mihrab," his appreciation of the Del Puente
Giorgione, which he describes as a Giambellino blossoming into a Titian,
with just the added exquisiteness that the world has only felt since Big
George of Castelfranco took up the brush. How the panel exchanged the
Pyrenees for the North Shore passed dimly through my mind as barely worth
recalling. It was the usual story of the rich and enterprising American
collector. Hanson Brooks had bought it and hung it in "The Curlews,"
where it bid fair to become legendary once more, but at last had lent it
with his other pictures to the Prestonville Museum of Science and the
Fine Arts, the goal of my present quest. While the picture lay _perdu_ at
Brooks's, there had been disquieting gossip; the Pretorian Club, which is
often terribly right in such matters, agreed that he had been badly sold.
None of this I believed for an instant. What could one doubt in a picture
owned by Mantovani and certified by Anitchkoff? Upon this point of
rumination the train stopped at Prestonville.

My approach to the masterpiece was reverently deliberate. At the
American House I actually lingered over the fried steak and dallied long
with the not impossible mince pie. Thus fortified, I followed Main
Street to the Museum--one of those depressingly correct new-Greek
buildings with which the country is being filled. Skirting with a shiver
the bleak casts from the antique in the atrium and mounting an absurdly
spacious staircase, I reached a doorway through which the _chef
d'oeuvre_ of my dreams confronted me cheerlessly. Its nullity was
appalling; from afar I felt the physical uneasiness that an equivocal
picture will usually produce in a devotee. To approach and study it was
a civility I paid not to itself but to its worshipful _provenance_. A
slight inspection told all there was to tell. The paint was palpably
modern; the surface would not have resisted a pin. In style it was a
distant echo of the Giorgione at Berlin. Yet, as I gazed and wondered
sadly, I perceived it was not a vulgar forgery--indeed not a forgery at
all. It had been done to amuse some painter of antiquarian bent. I even
thought, too rashly, that I recognised the touch of the youthful Watts,
and I could imagine the studio revel at which he or another had
valiantly laid in a Giorgione before the punch, as his contribution to
the evening's merriment. The picture upon the pie wrought a bla