I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs. Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive. Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of praise and congratulations.