But for the time being I have had enough. At this hour of writing I feel that I am stocked up with enough of Bouguereau's sorrel ladies and Titian's chestnut ones and Rubens' bay ones and Velasquez's pintos to last me, at a conservative estimate, for about seventy-five years. I am too young as a theatergoer to recall much about Lydia Thompson's Blondes, but I have seen sufficient of Botticelli's to do me amply well for a spell. I am still willing to walk a good distance to gaze on one of Rembrandt's portraits of one of his kinfolks, though I must say he certainly did have a lot of mighty homely relatives; and any time there is a first-rate Millet or Corot or Meissonier in the neighborhood I wish somebody would drop me a line, giving the address. As for pictures by Tintoretto, showing Venetian Doges hobnobbing informally with members of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls, and Guidos, and Murillos, I have had enough to do me for months and months and months. Nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of the Flemish school. Judging by what I have observed, practically all the Flemish painters were devout churchmen and painted their pictures on Friday. There was just one drawback to my complete enjoyment of that part of our European travels we devoted to art. We would go to an art gallery, hire a guide and start through. Presently I would come to a picture that struck me as being distinctly worth while. To my untutored conceptions it possessed unlimited beauty. There was, it seemed to me, life in the figures, reality in the colors, grace in the grouping. And then, just when I was beginning really to enjoy it, the guide would come and snatch me away. He would tell me the picture I thought I admired was of no account whatsoever--that the artist who painted it had not yet been dead long enough to give his work any permanent value; and he would drag me off to look at a cracked and crumbling canvas depicting a collection of saints of lacquered complexions and hardwood expressions, with cast-iron trees standing up against cotton batting clouds in the background, and a few extra halos floating round indiscriminately, like sun dogs on a showery day, and, up above, the family entrance into heaven hospitably ajar; and he would command me to bask my soul in this magnificent example of real art and not waste time on inconsequential and trivial things. Guides have the same idea of an artist that a Chinaman entertains for an egg. A fresh egg or a fresh artist will not do. It must have the perfume of antiquity behind it to make it attractive.