Perhaps he was not so unsophisticated as advertised in the catalogue. He helped himself pretty generously out of the popular supposition that an artist is a mild form of lunatic. He made good use of his talent for silence. But what ears and eyes! Nobody who had seen him paint could ever feel quite safe with him again. V It happened that Alexander James was studying at the Museum School. That the son of "the psychologist who made psychology read like a novel" and the nephew of "the novelist who made a novel read like psychology" should have identified Fritz's talent the first crack out of the box was about the least surprising thing in the world. The two young painters proceeded to form an offensive and defensive alliance. Where one was, there was the other also; on the baseball field, on painting expeditions, on pilgrimages in early spring into New Hampshire to climb Chocorua, and on occasional voyages into the land of pretty girls. It was good to see the pair together: two thoroughbreds. Both athletes, both artists, one dark, the other fair, both about the same height and build. People would turn to look after them as they passed with an expression of "Wonder who they are. Somebody out of the ordinary." Alexander was wont to disguise his frank admiration of Fritz behind a smoke screen of banter. This Fritz would suffer with an amused grin and the massive calm of a mastiff, for he had no such arsenal of repartee as this young gentleman from the household of a Harvard professor; but once in a while he would land a retort so neat as to set Alexander spinning. It did not take the Cambridge youth long to discover the use Fritz made of his talent for silence and it was his delight to give him away in his game of holding his tongue the better to use his eyes,--as Alexander said: "the wise old Bruin!" * * * * * In Massachusetts the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, April 19, is a holiday. It was 1913. In the parlor of an inn whose windows look northward across the snug haven of Rockport to the surf-scoured ledges of Pigeon Cove I was seated at a piano, back to the door, painfully dissecting a score of _Tristan_. The door opened and a voice exclaimed, "Good Lord!" It was Fritz. With him was Alexander James. Both were half ossified with the chill of the mid-April afternoon, for they had been painting on the shore down towards Straitsmouth. General astonishment. The two expeditions had originated quite independently. It was whimsically like those momentous chance encounters in picturesque spots which abound in the novels of Alexander's uncle Henry; but the novelist, be it noted, doesn't always save these coincidences from a slightly fishy sound which was totally wanting in this. They thawed themselves out and exhibited their sketches. Fritz had, as usual, gone after it and got it--a spirited bit: druidical heaps of pink granite boulders against dashing surf: dazzling white of foam-crest on deep blue.