my Keniston?" The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical
distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to
keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopaedia. The
name was not in the Encyclopaedia; but, as a compensating fact, it became
known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an
artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some
one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next
year, on the occasion of the President's golden jubilee, the Faculty, by
unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there
was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York
and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly
attempted to buy Professor Driffert's sketch, which the art journals cited
as a rare example of the painter's first or silvery manner. Thus there
gradually grew up a small circle of connoisseurs known in artistic, circles
as men who collected Kenistons.

Professor Wildmarsh, of the chair of Fine Arts and Archaeology, was the
first critic to publish a detailed analysis of the master's methods and
purpose. The article was illustrated by engravings which (though they had
cost the magazine a fortune) were declared by Professor Wildmarsh to give
but an imperfect suggestion of the esoteric significance of the originals.
The Professor, with a tact that contrived to make each reader feel himself
included among the exceptions, went on to say that Keniston's work would
never appeal to any but exceptional natures; and he closed with the usual
assertion that to apprehend the full meaning of the master's "message" it
was necessary to see him in the surroundings of his own home at Hillbridge.

Professor Wildmarsh's article was read one spring afternoon by a young
lady just speeding eastward on her first visit to Hillbridge, and already
flushed with anticipation of the intellectual opportunities awaiting her.