u going?" asks A of B.

"Nowhere," answers B.

"Can't you afford it?" asks the sympathetic A.

"Only been able to save up enough for the postcards," answers B,
gloomily; "no money left for the trip."

Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and addresses of
the people to whom they had promised to send cards. Everywhere, through
winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain pathway, one met with
prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as they walked:

"Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we
stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?"

Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment.
Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a
photographic studio, to be made beautiful.

"I want," says the lady, "a photograph my friends will really like. Some
of these second-rate photographers make one look quite plain. I don't
want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want something nice."

The obliging photographer does his best. The nose is carefully toned
down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn't know her. The
postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might have been.

"If it were not for the houses," says the postcard artist to himself,
"this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediaeval aspect."

So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been. The
lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and when
he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets mad. I
bought a postcard myself once representing the market place of a certain
French town. It seemed to me, looking at the postcard, that I hadn't
really seen France--not yet. I travelled nearly a hundred miles to see
that market place. I was careful to arrive on market day and to get
there at the right time. I reached the market square and looked at it.
Then I asked a gendarme where it was.

He said it was there--that I was in it.

I said, "I don't mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque
one."

He said it was the only market square they had. I took the postcard from
my pocket.

"Where are all the girls?" I asked him.

"What girls?" he demanded.

The Artist's Dream.

"Why, these girls;" I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been
about a hundred of them. There was not a plain one among the lot. Many
of them I should have called beautiful.