ery masculine features, but _honi soit qui mal y
pense_. I could not help thinking of one of General Horace Porter's good
stories. A school-master asks a little boy what his father is.

"Please, sir, papa told me not to tell."

"Oh, never mind, it's all right with me."

"Please, sir, he is the bearded lady at the dime museum."

From the museum I went to the free library in the City Hall. Dime
museums and free libraries--such is America. The attendance at the free
libraries increases rapidly every day, and the till at the dime museums
diminishes with proportionate rapidity.

[Illustration: "THE BEARDED LADY."]

After lunch I paid a visit to the exhibition of Vassili Vereschagin's
pictures. What on earth could possess the talented Russian artist, whose
coloring is so lovely, to expend his labor on such subjects! Pictures
like those, which show the horrors of a campaign in all their
hideousness, may serve a good purpose in creating a detestation of war
in all who see them. Nothing short of such a motive in the artist could
excuse the portrayal of such infamies. These pictures are so many
nightmares which will certainly haunt my eyes and brain for days and
nights to come. Battle scenes portrayed with a realism that is
revolting, because, alas, only too true. The execution of nihilists in a
dim, dreary, snow-covered waste. An execution of sepoys, the doomed
rebels tied to the mouths of cannon about to be fired off. Scenes of
torture, illustrative of the extent to which human suffering can be
carried, give you cold shudders in every fiber of your body. One horrid
canvas shows a deserted battlefield, the snow-covered ground littered
with corpses that ravens are tearing and fighting for. But, perhaps
worst of all, is a picture of a field, where, in the snow, lie the human
remains of a company of Russian soldiers who have been surprised and
slain by Turks. Among the bodies, outraged by horrible and nameless
mutilations, walks a priest, swinging a censer. One seems to be pursued
by, and impregnated with, a smell of cadaverous putrefaction. This
collection of pictures is installed in a place which has been used for
stabling horses in, and is reeking with stable odors and the carbolic
acid that has been employed to neutralize them. Your sense of smell is
in full sympathy with your horrified sense of sight: both are revolted.

* * * * *

Now, behind the three large rooms devoted to the Russian