“’In the background to the left stands St. Augustine with one foot on a wooden Indian which is lying upon the ground.  Why the artist decorated St. Augustine with a high hat and put his trousers inside his boots, and why he filled the saint’s belt with navy revolvers and tomahawks, has not been revealed.  It strikes us as being ridiculous to the very last degree.’

“Now, this seems to me to be a little too harsh.  That figure does not represent St. Augustine.  It is meant for an allegorical picture of Brute Force, and it has its foot upon Intellect—­Intellect, mind you! and not a cigar-store Indian.  It is a likeness of Captain Kidd, and I set it back to represent the fact that Brute Force belonged to the Dark Ages.  How on earth that man of yours ever got an idea that it was St. Augustine beats me.”

“It is singular,” said the major.

“And now let me direct your attention to another paragraph.  He says,

“’We were astonished to notice that while Noah’s ark goes sailing in the remote distance, there is close to it a cotton-factory, the chimney of which is pouring out white smoke that covers the whole of the sky in the picture, while the ark seems to be trying to sail down that chimney.  Now, they didn’t have cotton-factories in those days; the thing don’t hang.  The artist must have been drunk.’

“Now, this insinuation pains me.  How would you like it if you painted a picture of the tower of Babel, and somebody should come along and insist that it was the chimney of a cotton-factory, and that the clouds with which the sky is covered were smoke?  Cotton-factory!  Your man certainly cannot be familiar with the Scriptures; and when he talks about the ark sailing down that chimney, he forgets that the reason why it is standing on one end is that the water is so rough as to make it pitch.  You know the Bible says that arks did pitch ’without and within.’  Now, don’t it?”

“I think maybe it does,” said the major.

“But that’s not the worst.  I can stand that; but what do you think of a man that goes to criticising a work of art, and says—­Now just listen to this: 

“’On the right is a boy who has his clothes off and has apparently been in swimming, and has been rescued by a big yellow dog just as he was about to drown.  What this has to do with the Triumph of Truth we don’t know, but we do know that the dog is twice as large as the boy, and that he has the boy’s head in his mouth, while the boy’s hands are tied behind his back.  Now, for a boy to go in swimming with his hands tied, and for a dog to swallow his head so as to drag him out, appears to us the awfulest foolishness on earth.’