Neither do I know his name, but I call him Signor Pizzicato, for it is quite evident that nature intended him for an Operatic career. How he ever came to be a barber, I cannot imagine. Perhaps he sang in the Barber of Seville and lost his voice and became a realist, as some painters lose their sense of form and become cubists or futurists. Whatever he should have been or might have been or was, a barber is what he is now, and I gaze upon him in fascination as with a priceless gesture of thumb and forefinger (as if he should pluck an individual mote from a sunbeam) he extols to his customer and to you, the bouquet so ravishing of the hair tonic he holds in his other hand, on the sale of which he presumably receives a large commission. Then there is that delightful little Miss clad in airy next-to-nothings—but no, on second thought I shall not introduce you to her. I fear she is not to be trusted. The last time I sat opposite to her in a street-car in Cleveland—(or was it in Buffalo)—she caused me to go five blocks past my destination which happened to be a railway station, so that I was two blocks late for my train. All I will tell you about her, gentle reader, is that she has fringed gentian eyes with a look in them that says quite plainly nothing would gratify her more than to play the same trick upon you. All this chatter, I am aware, has nothing to do with Art, that is to say the “Art of Painting”; that large, severe-looking female you sometimes see crouched in an uncomfortable position on a still more uncomfortable cornice of a public building, wearing a laurel wreath and a granite peplum, and holding in her hand a huge stone palette. But sometimes this severe female climbs down from her stone perch and takes a day off, Coney Island-wise, on the billboards and street cars, and then if she is not always at her best, she is often very amusing. And just because a goddess isn’t stuck up it doesn’t prove that she isn’t a goddess—does it? [Illustration] THE LURE OF THE “AD” Kipling once, when sojourning in a far country, complained bitterly of the thoughtlessness of his friends at home in sending him a batch of magazines shorn (to save postage) of all the advertisements. Which shows that the most grown-up of artists may still have the heart of a child. For my part, if I were forced to make choice between the advertising pages and the reading matter (so-called), I should in nine periodicals out of ten choose the former. To the grown-up child the advertising section of the magazine takes the place of the Shop-Window of infancy through which, with bulging eyes and mouth agape, like some mazed minnow staring at the submerged Rhine-Gold, he once gazed at the tinsel treasure so bitterly beyond his penny’s reach.