It is more compensating in Europe to go from place to place with some special work or subject in view than to go for mere sight-seeing. Your special work brings you nearer the people. If your landlady asks you what it is, and you take the trouble to tell her, she or some of her friends will at once see that you know all their acquaintances who are engaged in the same line of inquiry, and while the new acquaintances may not be socially or intellectually your ideals, yet their conversation will help you in the language and give you many opportunities. Dresden I only know through hard work in the galleries, as though all its sights are familiar—the Schloss, Green Vaults with their immense treasures, the Military Museum, Museum of Natural History, the Grand Opera House, the Frauenkirche, Japanese Palace, cafés, coinages and statues; yet the picture gallery, with its priceless “Madonna di San Sisto” of Raphael is to me the starting point of interest and the essence of Dresden life. From eight o’clock in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon faithful copyists labor in the gallery. The price received for their work scarcely keeps them from starving. To go in among them for a time and work and feel as they do, enlarges one’s sympathies, and teaches one to love the masterpieces of the great artists. To the uninitiated in such matters it may be well to explain that before the permission is given to copy a picture in any of the European galleries, a good deal of red tape must be looked after, especially in Germany. The director demands a specimen of the applicant’s work, which must be a study from nature, either figure or landscape or still life. It is with considerable trepidation that the office of the “Herr Director” is entered. If the applicant is successful, he or she comes out with an elaborate paper containing the agreement, the name of picture to be copied, the number, room, etc., with the director’s name and the seal attached. One of the _gallerie diener_, as they are called in Germany, takes you under his care, arranges an easel, a piece of carpet, a rest-stick and table. You are recognized among the copyists, and the hat of every _gallerie diener_ is raised at your approach or departure. When you have finished, the inspector is allowed to criticise your work. You must pay the _diener_ who has waited upon you some _trink geld_, or a fee, as we would express it. At noon you can eat your cold lunch, in company with the other copyists, in front of a Raphael or a Correggio, a Titian or a Rubens, scrutinize its merits or laugh at its blunders, or speculate on the old master’s methods of using their pigments, without being amenable to any court. An artist’s life is a life of liberty—of thought, at least. Many of these copyists spend their afternoons in sketching, thus establishing their originality and emancipating themselves from servile observance of other men’s methods.