Here was something that must have been bought some time ago (for nobody can actually have bought a Breton recently), which must have been hung on the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had not been banished when the style had changed! And yet the rest of the room told me unmistakably that the owner of that room knew as well as any one else what was now thought of that Breton by people “in the know.” Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. Never before had I thought to admire so ardently the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface of a Breton. But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no reason for its presence except that somebody liked it enough to keep it in spite of what other people thought. Well, now--I took heart--maybe the situation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps we may have a live national taste in art, twenty or more generations later on. If there was _any_body not an artist himself, who had the honesty and courage which must be at the foundation of anything alive in artistic taste, why perhaps.... Just then a dreadful possibility came into my mind--perhaps it had been a wedding present from a wealthy uncle not to be offended? On this my host and hostess came in. As we talked of the object of my visit (which had nothing to do with art) I was constantly spying on the expression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half-despairingly to the sound of their voices, watching feverishly every turn of expression in their kind, honest faces. I had never seen them before that day and probably shall have no occasion to see them again. But I often think of them and wonder about them. They really looked as though they might be capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no longer in fashion. Perhaps they _had_ kept that Breton on their walls out of sheer, honest, brave, artistic integrity.... But the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems. ALMERA HAWLEY CANFIELD b. 1787; m. 1808; d. 1874 Of course I never saw her. She died years before I was born. But she left behind her a portrait so full of her personality that no living figure is more human to me than my great-grandmother. I do not at all refer to the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, showing her as a withered old woman in a frilled cap, which is now the only tangible sign of her existence left in her old home. No; that might have been any withered old woman in a frilled cap. There is another portrait of my great-grandmother not done on canvas with oils. Here are some of the strokes which one by one, at long intervals, as if casually and by chance, have painted it for me.