The public peered, puzzled, shook its sapient head, shrugged its authoritative shoulders, and sundry criticisms crept into the journals; but the prophet was judged in “his own country”; and home work, according to universal canons, rarely finds favor among home awarding committees, whose dulness its uncomprehended excellence affronts.

One censured vehemently the masonry of the city wall; another deplored pathetically the “defective foreshortening of a dog’s shoulders”; the picture “lacked depth of tone”; the “coloring was too bizarre”, the “tints too neutral”.

Like chemicals tested in a laboratory, or like Pharaoh’s lean kine, each objection devoured the preceding one; and unanimity of blame assaulted only one salient point on the entire canvas:  the red sandals of the Greek girl—­upon which outraged good taste fell with pitiless fury.

Undismayed, Beryl withdrew her picture, erased the ciphers in the corner, and shipped it to New York to Doctor Grantlin, who had recently returned from Europe; requesting him to place it at a picture dealer’s on Broadway, and to withhold the name of its birth-place.

Two weeks later, a popular journal published an elaborate description of “A painting supposed to have been obtained abroad by a New York collector, who merited congratulation upon possession of a masterpiece, which recalled the marvellous technique of Gerome, the atmosphere of Jules Breton, the rich, mellow coloring, and especially the scrupulous fidelity of archaic detail, which characterized Alma Tadema; and was conspicuously manifest in the red shoes so distinctively typical of Theban women”.

Mr. Kendall caused this article to be copied into the leading newspaper of his own city; and the first mail, thereafter, carried to New York an offer of eight hundred dollars for the painting, from the President of the “Museum” Directors, who had been so shocked by the unknown significance of the “red shoes”.  After a few days, it was generally known, but mentioned with bated breath, that the “Antigone” had been bought by a wealthy Philadelphian, who paid for it two thousand dollars, and hung it in his gallery, where Fortunys, Madrazos, and Diazs ornamented the walls.

Why should journeying abroad to render “Caesar’s things” to foreign Caesars, demand such total bankruptcy that we must needs repudiate the just debts of home creditors, whose chimneys smoke just beyond the fence that divides us?  De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a traditional and sacred duty to departed workers; but does it exhaust human charity, or require contemptuous crusade against equally honest, living toilers?  Are antiquity and foreign birthplace imperatively essential factors in the award of praise for even faithful and noble work?  We lament the caustic moroseness of embittered Schopenhauer, brooding savagely over his failure to secure contemporaneous recognition; yet after all, did he malign his race, or his age, when, in answer to the inquiry where he desired to be buried, he scornfully exclaimed:  “No matter where; posterity will find me.”