a secret order badge big enough to serve as a hitching weight and a peach-stone carved to look like a fruit basket.  Everything about him suggested health underwear, chewing tobacco and fried mush for breakfast.  His whiskers were cut after a pattern I had not seen in years and years.  In my mind such whiskers were associated with those happy and long distant days of childhood when we yelled Supe! at a stagehand and cherished Old Cap Collier as a model of what—­if we had luck—­we would be when we grew up.  By rights, he belonged in the second act of a rural Indian play, of a generation or two ago; but here he was, wandering disconsolately through the Louvre.  He had come over to spend four months, he told us with a heave of the breath, and he still had two months of it unspent, and he just didn’t see how he was going to live through it!

The old lady was in the great National Museum at Naples, fluttering about like a distracted little brown hen.  She was looking for the Farnese Bull.  It seemed her niece in Knoxville had told her the Farnese Bull was the finest thing in the statuary line to be found in all Italy, and until she had seen that, she wasn’t going to see anything else.  She had got herself separated from the rest of her party and she was wandering along about alone, seeking information regarding the whereabouts of the Farnese Bull from smiling but uncomprehending custodians and doorkeepers.  These persons she would address at the top of her voice.  Plainly she suffered from a delusion, which is very common among our people, that if a foreigner does not understand you when addressed in an ordinary tone, he will surely get your meaning if you screech at him.  When we had gone some distance farther on and were in another gallery, we could still catch the calliope-like notes of the little old lady, as she besought some one to lead her to the Farnese Bull.

That she came right out and spoke of the Farnese Bull as a bull, instead of referring to him as a gentleman cow, was evidence of the extent to which travel had enlarged her vision, for with half an eye anyone could tell that she belonged to the period of our social development when certain honest and innocent words were supposed to be indelicate—­that she had been reared in a society whose ideal of a perfect lady was one who could say limb, without thinking leg.  I hope she found her bull, but I imagine she was disappointed when she did find it.  I know I was.  The sculpturing may be of a very high order—­the authorities agree that it is—­but I judge the two artists to whom the group is attributed carved the bull last and ran out of material and so skimped him a bit.  The unfortunate Dirce, who is about to be bound to his horns by the sons of Antiope, the latter standing by to see that the boys make a good thorough job of it, is larger really than the bull.  You can picture the lady carrying off the bull but not the bull carrying off the lady.