Probably even patriotism does not demand of us an admiration for the beauty of the very first American girls--the dusky darlings of our primitive tribes. These earliest American girls were not dowered with the fatal gift of beauty as we understand beauty. Indeed, it is quite generally admitted that the American Indian girl is not and never was so pretty as the girls of some of the Pacific islands, for example. Far be it from me to attack any precious traditions concerning the red man, or the red woman, either. Far be it from me to touch with impious hand the romantic panoply of Pocahontas. I am not writing a scientific treatise. I have no point to prove. It is quite possible that there is something distinctive in the personality of the Indian girl, whether she be as poetry has painted her or as she stands in the analysis of science. If I pass her by it is in no spirit of partisanship toward either view. She is an old story, and some day when she is a new story we may have occasion for surprise. [Illustration] The fact is that I must content myself here with a glance at the American girl of more recent times, though she also will seem to be an old story if we permit ourselves to remember the number of things which have been said. We are not likely to forget the unction with which foreign visitors sketched the daughters of Colonial America. Indeed, we are in a measure dependent upon those sketches for a knowledge of these ancestral daughters. As in all judgments of remote appearances, we here must lean upon mere opinion. There was no camera in the days of Priscilla, nor in the days of Dolly Madison, and painted portraiture, unchallenged by the photograph, had reached heights of admirable gallantry. For purposes of pictorial reconstruction we have an enthusiastic description, the dubious confessions of a diary, a charming little miniature or a mellowing canvas in an old frame, a quaint gown, wrinkled by time; but we have no photograph. I hear the Romanticist mutter, “Thank Heaven for _that_!” Alas! the photograph is an expert witness, and how he can disagree! Was ever any human specialist on the witness stand so dogmatic, so insinuating, so sophistical as the photograph? Who, without an obstinately anthropological mind, shall regret that the beginnings of our national life are veiled in the Ante-Photographic era--that we may invest them with qualities we wish they might have had, as well as with those qualities of which we think we know? Who shall say that humanity, A. P., dwelling in a softening haze beyond the harshly illuminated era of Realism, is worse off than humanity thereafter? Looking at the matter practically, who shall regret that Lady Washington never had her pretty head in a vise, her face masked a ghastly white with powder to make her countenance more actinic, and her eyes instructed to glare at a fixed point for upward of sixty mortal seconds! Surely there are some