(This is no isolated personal impression. Wherever he went people felt the same intense curiosity about him. Sometimes they stared at him so that he asked me if his face was smudged.) Was this stranger conversible? He was. Presently he was speaking of the colonial doorways on Chestnut Street with a discrimination which suggested the architect. No. It appeared that he was studying under Mr. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Next, that he came from Pittsburgh. Here was a bond in common. As two young Middle Westerners we resented the social cold storage which New England imposes as a probationary period of acquaintance. We condoled. We fraternized. We were as neighbors meeting in a foreign land. At last somebody with whom it was safe to scrape acquaintance in the good old-fashioned Middle Western way without incurring suspicion of designs on one another's souls, bodies, or estates. He climbed Beacon Hill with me to the house where I lived, carrying a paper bag which, he explained modestly, contained his breakfast: two bananas and a shredded wheat biscuit. The evening was mild. Windows stood open to the breeze which rumpled the leaves of an old linden where it spread its boughs in the brick-walled court. He promptly took off his coat, displaying in the rays of a green-shaded student lamp a pair of forearms worthy of the hands which went with them. Summer and winter he wore his sleeves rolled above his elbows. His wrists resented cuffs as wild creatures resent cages. He stretched out his long legs on a cot which did duty by the fireplace as a sofa; pushed his hair off his forehead with both hands, fingers interlocked, a trick he had; and gave symptoms of feeling at home. Was he talkative? Not much! Never did clam yield shell to knife edge more gingerly. He would and he would not. Shy, reserved, proud, devoured with ambition, savagely determined, a prey to some misgivings, genuinely modest, and anxious to talk it over with the right person, but by no means sure who the right person was. On sped the ambrosial hours of the spring evening. Bit by bit he revealed himself. This was his third year in the Museum School. He admired the technique of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Benson; he prized their instruction. But he distrusted their smoothness. He missed vigor. All round him he saw students neglecting their own creative bents to produce "little Bensons" and "little Tarbells." Already he had resolved to quit Boston as soon as his student days were over. "I don't say I shall ever be able to paint as well as they can; but I must be myself,--not an imitation Tarbell."