The Wife Expected That They Would Find Some One In Egypt Who Spoke English; She Had Expected They Would Speak French In Spain, But Had Been Disappointed.

They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and were almost frozen already.

They were as good and sweet and nice as they could be, and we were truly sorry to part with them and leave them to what seemed to be a mistake which they were not to blame for.

I wish that all Europeans and all Europeanized Americans knew how to value such incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry into the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given something to know from just which kind country town and companionable commonwealth of our Union they had come, but I would not have given much, for I knew that they could have come from almost any. In their modest satisfaction with our own order of things, our language, our climate, our weather, they would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but would give them a fair chance; and, if when they got home again, they would have to report unfavorably of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman's Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous reservations. They would know much more than they knew before they came abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the wiser and none the worse for it. They would still be of their shrewd, pure American ideals, and would judge their recollections as they judged their experiences by them; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty to those ideals.

They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans who used to go through European galleries buying copies of the masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making. With this pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies. _I_ wish I could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to work, but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not from the tourists but from one another. They used to be all men, mostly grown gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and younger and the women are sometimes very pretty. In the Prado one saw several pairs of such youth conversing together, forgetful of everything around them, and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could not well be distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls could enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between them and the _novios_ outside their windows; and no tourist of the least heart could help rejoicing with them.

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