value such incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry
into the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the
light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given something
to know from just which kind country town and companionable commonwealth
of our Union they had come, but I would not have given much, for I knew
that they could have come from almost any. In their modest satisfaction
with our own order of things, our language, our climate, our weather,
they would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but would give them
a fair chance; and, if when they got home again, they would have to
report unfavorably of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman's
Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous
reservations. They would know much more than they knew before they came
abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass
darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the wiser and none
the worse for it. They would still be of their shrewd, pure American
ideals, and would judge their recollections as they judged their
experiences by them; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty
to those ideals.

They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans
who used to go through European galleries buying copies of the
masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making. With this
pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the
desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any
sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The
galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been
fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies. _I_ wish
I could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to work,
but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not from the
tourists but from one another. They used to be all men, mostly grown