merchants when they have money-but the company store must restrict this tendency. The children are sturdy, rarely pretty, and seem intelligent but unresponsive, wholly different in this last respect from the children of the Portuguese. The Finnish women neither in clothes nor houses seem as clean and tidy as the women of the other Scandinavian races who have come to us; at least their houses on Cape Ann would indicate a marked difference in these particulars. It is rather significant that the natives of Gloucester refer to the Portuguese as citizens, to the Finns as foreigners. The schools on the Cape are excellent and are well attended-the usual record of Massachusetts. The high school is a fine building, well equipped,

and, with the town libraries, a source of local pride.

For not a few years Gloucester has wanted a suitable breakwater built on a bar to make her harbor more safe. At present the unfinished breakwater is most dangerous. At this writing a large schooner is lying on top of the stones of the breakwater, a complete wreck. It is two years since any work has been done there. So with the fisheries question, beyond the few whose National pride is touched, and the fishermen dependent on the decision of these questions to be freed from restrictions and annoyances, the mass of the people of the country have been bored by the discussion. To such communities as Gloucester these are the

paramount questions, and the world is selfish or cruel that does not respond to their vital issues. Few realize that on Cape Ann the fisheries question began in 1625, when the Dorchester Company sought to eject a company of Pilgrims and sent a representative to accomplish it. Miles Standish demanded a surrender of the English, and had it not been for the diplomacy of the gracious Roger Conant, blood would have been shed.

There is one permanency in Gloucester. The sea still takes men and ships. Women are widowed, children are made fatherless. The records vary but little. Now and then a storm takes so many that the world pauses and comments. One wonders how life can move on with this constant shadow descending or just passing away from the community. When one reads of the disasters which have left scores of children, in some years hundreds of children, fatherless, the absence of poverty from Gloucester cannot be understood. The cargoes pay onefourth of one per cent. to the Widows' Fund. A house has been built to secure for the most needy comfortable tenement homes. "We always help them to get on their feet, and they keep there afterward," was the explanation. "The summer boarders make lots of work." There are problems in Gloucester, as her daily papers clearly show, but degrading poverty is not one of them.

As one stands on any bluff far up on the heights of the city, looking at her outer or inner harbor, or over on her northern shore, one repeats Champlain's old name, "Beauport;" and were it not for the sentiment "Gloucester" represents, one would wish that the name of the French chevalier had been retained.

The story-writer whose theme is the fisherman and his environment must not select a coast encircled by an electric car, lighted by electricity, having churches of every denomination and isms of the newest, public and high schools, water supply that has been the theme of political discords. Cape Ann is not the stage for story-writers. She still has nooks and crannies where one may shut out the sight of shipping, of derrick, and of wharf. The water still dashes over her rocky shore, the lights still change and linger on headland and ocean; sails still lie against the horizon in lazy angles, or rock on dimpled surface; ships on the distant horizon, like great giants, inspire the imagination; the waves still murmur and laugh at one's feet, but the romance of fishing is gone. Its sorrow remains in broken hearts and homes. But the men who go down to the sea in ships have every provision made for their safety on ship and shore. The market waits on them, and the day of uncertain return from the cargo is passed, for the science of the world and its inventions have been turned to the fisherman's service.

just the right shade, she would apply it carefully, and then tilt her head to one side and contemplate the effect with a sigh of relief. She was very neat-a bad sign for an artist. Her little, thin, nervous hands were innocent of paint; her gray gown was immaculate. Her ash blonde hair she seemed to have looked upon as something to be gotten out of the way as expeditiously as possible; it was neither crimped nor banged,' but drawn back from her forehead without parting, and twisted into a hard little knot. I don't know what there was about her that haunted me after I had gone into another room, but I had to come back before leaving the Gallery just to see if she were still so busily at work, although I was quite sure that she would be.

"The next day I arrived early, determined to go directly to the little room on the further corridor, where Botticelli's Venus was awaiting me; but, before I knew it, I found myself again before the Carlo Dolce. The little copyist was very busy. Her picture was nearly done, and she was adding the finishing touchesplaying ladies' maid to her Saint, arranging the folds of her blue robe, smoothing her sleek hair, and putting a little fresh rouge under her big eyes. I noticed the same precision as before; her painting had none of the freedom of enthusiasm; it was pitifully pathetic. She was so intent upon her work that I was able to study her without attracting her attention. She was no longer young, nor yet old-about forty, perhaps; but her utter disregard of personal adornment, her indifference to making the most of herself as other women of her age would have done, made her seem rather older than younger; and yet there was something almost girlish in this very neglect, and there was a touching childlikeness in her dutiful earnestness. Her features were not bad, only a little pinched and careworn; and her eyes looked as if they might be pretty without the disfiguring spectacles. Her gray dress was as simple as dress could be; it was evidently made for covering, not, like Aaron's garments, for glory and for beauty.' No bit of ribbon or of lace betrayed any latent vanity. But what touched me most was the expression of joyless determination, the patient 'doyour-duty' look on her face, as if she had

no illusions about herself or Carlo Dolce with which to gild her work.

"Something in her ways made me guess her to be a compatriot of my own, and, following a sudden impulse, I stepped to her side and asked her if her picture were already sold.

"She looked up at me with some surprise, but quite unaffectedly, and without the least flutter of self-consciousness or gratification, although I fancied that the sound of my American voice caused a certain friendliness in her answer.

"She told me that she had a permanent order for her copies from a dealer who paid her well enough for such work.

"I'm not very fond of this kind of picture myself,' she added, but it answers the demands of the vox populi. The little harmless attempt at pedantry betrayed the New Englander. 'Not always the vox Dei, you think?' I asked, to show her that I was not an altogether unworthy fellow-countryman, even though I did hail' from Philadelphia. She nodded a smiling approval at my erudition, and showed no objection to my continuing the conversation and asking her all sorts of questions about her work and her interBut while she answered me in little, precise, unadorned sentences, she kept punctiliously at work, patting her Saint gently here and there with her brush, and tilting her head like a sparrow to get the effect.

ests.

"It was the story of a poor, colorless little life which I got from her in this way little by little. It made me wish that she would stop polishing up that exasperating Carlo Dolce and turn her attention to putting some scarlet and purple and fine linen upon her own neglected existence. She was the daughter of a Congregational parson, in a little New England village, who had made no objection to her using the few hundreds which she had inherited from an aunt in coming abroad to study art.

Curiously unpractical views of life. some of those country parsons have! He was fond of his daughter in his way, and showed his fondness for her by letting her carry out the dream of her girlhood, even although it involved her crossing the ocean alone at twenty and making her own way in a foreign land, with no knowledge of the language, and only a few little amateur landscape sketches as pass