one of the artists leaned forward and skillfully broke the crust, and myriads of canary birds (blackbirds not being obtainable even by Monte Cristo) outpoured and flew to every corner of the room, just as a charming young figure of a girl, draped from head to foot in black illusion, with a stuffed blackbird upon her head, arose from the dish. It was so new, original, and pretty, that comment upon it is absurd. The society of these men was so good, so envied, and so far above the average “low-brow” that it was preyed upon (probably more than other class at any other time in the social history of America) by the jealous and the criminal, and blackmailed to an extraordinary degree. It just naturally broke itself up; Beauty is sensitive and would rather disappear than run the risk of unwelcome publicity. Referring to the character of Stanford White, his right hand never knew what his left was doing. I think he more nearly fitted Emerson’s definition of the word “gentleman” than anyone else I have ever known. It runs something like this: “A gentleman is one who never brings his mental or physical troubles from his bedroom; if he cannot leave them behind, he stays with them.” If the word can be divided into its two constituents—“gentle” and “man”—Stanny was certainly both, and I think “gentleness” (the opposite of “weakness”) is possibly one of the words which implies that we are now some distance from our ancestors, the cave dwellers. He may have had troubles of his own, but we never knew about them, for he was always so busy doing something for some one else that he hadn’t time to talk of himself. He pulled me out of many a financial hole, doubtless sometimes with much work for himself. It is not always easy, even for rich men, to get sums of money on the spur of the moment. Once he lent me three thousand dollars on an order I was carrying out, and when I paid him, he returned me the interest money the next day, with the words: “I give you this on one condition, that you use it to go over to Europe and visit your family. You need a vacation.” Dear old Stanny, it wasn’t the money help that he gave his friends that made him so charming, but it was the little things that require so much delicate thought. I do not think he spent ten minutes a week thinking about himself.