As for the families representing the defended and entrenched fortunes of Springfield, theirs is still the practice of keeping their children out of public school, for fear of contamination with teachers who read such papers as _The Atlantic Monthly_, and other vulgar publications. The children must be sent off to teachers who flatter and flatter and flatter. But we do not talk about these matters generally. We talk about New Springfield. The Prognosticators discover that still others have been dreaming joyfully all alone of the future of Springfield. One fiery artist of our town brings in quite definite testimony. He was born in the village of Rochester, near to Springfield, but has no sign in his manner of being a citizen of the United States. Quite an old man, Gregory Webster has the ways of boulevard heroes of Paris who swung their canes like swashbucklers, among the cafes, in 1876. He speaks English with a French accent. Yet he has been a tremendous force for good in the history of American Art. Thousands upon thousands of pupils have passed through his studios. He has been a courageous patron of young artists. With infallible taste he has purchased their best pictures, as soon as their pictures were good, thereby giving them reputations twenty years sooner, and himself “going broke.” He has championed the most elegant craftsmanship. In torrents of tireless language, with an unflagging zeal and animation, he has talked down and out the cheap and popular conception of the uses of art. He has exalted the great portrait masters. He has exalted brushwork and drawing into a ritual, and good color into a finality of the soul. He has been marvelously generous in his sympathy and his patience with budding talent, and therefore the artists’ aspiration of America for a whole generation has come to his front door. He is, in actual subject matter, in his own pictures an unimaginative creature. He is able to paint fishes better than men and rabbits better than women, and yet, since he painted fishes and rabbits with Olympian finality, they have been enshrined in the highest galleries of the world next to portraits of human creatures by Rembrandt and Hals and Velasquez. A stranger to these others comes to me. Nathan Levi, son of one of the Rabbis of our tiny Springfield Ghetto. He at once wins my heart. I have always found myself in peculiar sympathy with the Jews. Once past the moment of shyly seeking my confidence, he is full of the Jewish expressiveness and demonstration. He is astonished beyond measure to discover a double consciousness within himself. In this century he is as orthodox as his father, and a young man devoted to the routine of the pawn shop. In 2018 he is in a hundred ways opposite.