There was just one drawback to my complete enjoyment of that part of our European travels we devoted to art.  We would go to an art gallery, hire a guide and start through.  Presently I would come to a picture that struck me as being distinctly worth while.  To my untutored conceptions it possessed unlimited beauty.  There was, it seemed to me, life in the figures, reality in the colors, grace in the grouping.  And then, just when I was beginning really to enjoy it, the guide would come and snatch me away.

He would tell me the picture I thought I admired was of no account whatsoever—­that the artist who painted it had not yet been dead long enough to give his work any permanent value; and he would drag me off to look at a cracked and crumbling canvas depicting a collection of saints of lacquered complexions and hardwood expressions, with cast-iron trees standing up against cotton batting clouds in the background, and a few extra halos floating round indiscriminately, like sun dogs on a showery day, and, up above, the family entrance into heaven hospitably ajar; and he would command me to bask my soul in this magnificent example of real art and not waste time on inconsequential and trivial things.  Guides have the same idea of an artist that a Chinaman entertains for an egg.  A fresh egg or a fresh artist will not do.  It must have the perfume of antiquity behind it to make it attractive.

At the Louvre, in Paris, on the first day of the two we spent there, we had for our guide a tall, educated Prussian, who had an air about him of being an ex-officer of the army.  All over the Continent you are constantly running into men engaged in all manner of legitimate and dubious callings, who somehow impress you as having served in the army of some other country than the one in which you find them.  After this man had been chaperoning us about for some hours and we had stopped to rest, he told a good story.  It may not have been true—­it has been my experience that very few good stories are true; but it served aptly to illustrate a certain type of American tourist numerously encountered abroad.

“There were two of them,” he said in his excellent English, “a gentleman and his wife; and from what I saw of them I judged them to be very wealthy.  They were interested in seeing only such things as had been recommended by the guidebook.  The husband would tell me they desired to see such and such a picture or statue.  I would escort them to it and they would glance at it indifferently, and the gentleman would take out his lead pencil and check off that particular object in the book; and then he would say:  ’All right—­we’ve seen that; now let’s find out what we want to look at next.’  We still serve a good many people like that—­not so many as formerly, but still a good many.

“Finally I decided to try a little scheme of my own.  I wanted to see whether I could really win their admiration for something.  I picked out a medium-size painting of no particular importance and, pointing to it, said impressively:  ’Here, m’sieur, is a picture worth a million dollars—­without the frame!’