“There they are, on the shelves.” “I see. Poetry and romance. They must wait. Get to your mathematics and your anatomy right away. Another point: you must train your eye--you must teach yourself to see.” “Teach myself to see? I believe I was born with that ability.” “But nobody is born with a _trained_ ability--nobody. A cow sees--she sees all the outsides of things, no doubt, but it is only the trained eye that sees deeper, sees the soul of them, the meaning of them, the spiritual essence. Are you sure that you see more than the cow sees? You must go to Paris. You will never learn to see here. There they’ll teach you; there they’ll train you; there they’ll work you like a slave; there they’ll bring out the talent that’s in you. Be off! Don’t twaddle here any longer!” Flagg thought it over and resolved that the advice was worth taking. He and his brother cleared for Paris. They put in their first afternoon there scoffing at the works of the old masters in the Louvre. They laughed at themselves for crossing a wide ocean to learn what masterly painting might be by staring at these odious things. As for the “Mona Lisa,” they exhausted their treasure of wit in making fun of it. Next day they put themselves into the hands of the Beaux Arts people, and that was the end of play. They had to start at the very bottom of their trade and learn it over again, detail by detail, and learn it _right_, this time. They slaved away, night and day for three months, and wore themselves to shadows. Then they had a day off, and drifted into the Louvre. Neither said a word for some time; each disliked to begin; but at last, in front of the “Mona Lisa,” after standing mute awhile one of them said: “Speak out. Say it.” “Say it yourself.” “Well, then, we _were_ cows before!” “Yes--it’s the right name for it. That is what we were. It is unbelievable, the change that has come over these pictures in three months. It is the difference between a landscape in the twilight and the same landscape in the daytime.” Then they fell into each other’s arms. This all came back to me, now, as I saw this living “Mona Lisa” punting across L’Eau Morte.