It had sorter bothered me, thinkin’ I might ha’ imagined it. I took a mornin’ when the sun was real pleasant and warm, I guessed I wouldn’t jump for a few old bones. But I did jump, somethin’ wicked. Thar warn’t no bones! Thar warn’t nothin’! Not even the gold ring I minded bein’ on the little finger. I don’t know ef there ever was anythin’. I’ve worried myself sick over it. I be’n diggin’ and diggin’ day in and day out Till Clarence ketched me at it. Oh, I knowed real well what you all thought, An’ I ain’t sayin’ you’re not right, But I ain’t goin’ to end in no country ’sylum If I c’n help it. The shiv’rin’ fits come on me sudden like. I know ’em, don’t you trouble. I’ve fretted considerable about the ’sylum, I guess I be’n frettin’ all the time I ain’t be’n diggin’. But anyhow I can’t dig to Chicago, can I? Thank you, Mis’ Priest, I’m better now. I only dropped in in passin’! I’ll jest be steppin’ along to French’s. No, I won’t be seein’ nobody in the mornin’, It’s a pretty early start. Don’t you stand ther’, Mis’ Priest, The wind’ll blow yer lamp out, An’ I c’n see easy, I got aholt o’ the gate now. I ain’t a mite tired, thank you. Goodnight. Potatoes in a Cellar R. G. I am not here to harry institutions, to prod up mummies swathed in red tape and embalmed in routine and respectability, nor am I here to bury the unburied dead. People say, “Why do you jump on the Art Institute for becoming a trade school? It is only following the tendencies of the times. Art is like everything else.” There you have it!—the whole trouble. There is no consciousness of art, no consciousness that art is beyond all these things—that it is as the sun to the earth, and if it were to fail us we should grow like potatoes in a deep cellar. It is only when art students say, “This is not what we sought. Where shall we go, what shall we love, what do, to find what we sought?” that the Art Institute is brought into it, and then only to serve as an example of the lack of art consciousness everywhere, and to emphasize the fact that the artist has no place in this land of wasteful virtues. An artist almost disgraces the family into which he is born, he is pitied a little by outsiders, he is left alone. At last, when he can stand it no longer, he breaks the parent heart, and goes out full of high hope to find his own kind and to keep his own faith. After a short time he finds the art school very much like a factory; he learns to do his piece, when he had thought to create a new beauty, and he finds, too, that he is still an outcast for his beliefs and desires.