One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease. “See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with good drawing? What do you _want_ in a painting?” He waved a well-kept hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And space? And interesting composition? And true values? _I_ ought to know a good painting when I see one. What are you boys talking about when you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what _is_ your opinion?” He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him. The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried, kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course. It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....” Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down. “THE OLD NEW ENGLAND STOCK” Students and classifiers of American “types” often say that the grandfathers of the present generation of New Englanders represent the “New England type” much more accurately than their descendants of to-day. Some times I wonder what they mean by “New England type.” Apparently they make the phrase stand for blue-nosed, thin-blooded frigidity of temperament, a pinched, mean, timorous attitude towards human life and human nature, and a cold, calculating capacity to skin other people alive in a bargain. At any rate, the presumption seems to be that whatever else they were, New Englanders were always very much of the same sort. Here are my two New England grandfathers. Both of them had identically the same sort of ancestry, plain English people who came to the New World about the middle of the seventeenth century. Certain genealogically-minded members of the two families have gathered reverently together the scant tradition concerning the generations that bridge the two centuries and a half of life in America; but though I have dutifully plodded through the thick volumes of “family histories” I have never been able to see that any of my forebears did anything more than earn their own livings and keep out of jail. Younger branches of both families moved up into Vermont, after the end of the French-and-Indian wars and have lived here ever since. Both my grandfathers spent their boyhood on Vermont farms. And there the resemblance ceases.