and vegetables that had not taken the prizes. They were more censorious
than they would have been perhaps if they had not been defeated
themselves; he heard them dispute the wisdom of most of the awards as
the shoutings and clappings from the racetrack penetrated the lonely
hall. They creaked wearily up and down in their new shoes or best
shoes, and he knew how they wished themselves at home and in bed, and
wondered why they had ever been such fools as to come, anyway.
Occasionally, one of their husbands lagged in, as if in search of his
wife, but kept at a safe distance, after seeing her, or hung about with
a group of other husbands, who could not be put to shame or suffering
as they might if they had appeared singly.

II.

Ludlow believed that if the right fellow ever came to the work, he
could get as much pathos out of our farm folks as Millet got out of his
Barbizon peasants. But the fact was that he was not the fellow; he
wanted to paint beauty not pathos; and he thought, so far as he thought
ethically about it, that, the Americans needed to be shown the festive
and joyous aspects of their common life. To discover and to represent
these was his pleasure as an artist, and his duty as a citizen. He
suspected, though, that the trotting-match was the only fact of the
Pymantoning County Fair that could be persuaded to lend itself to his
purpose. Certainly, there was nothing in the fair-house, with those
poor, dreary old people straggling through it, to gladden an artistic
conception. Agricultural implements do not group effectively, or pose
singly with much picturesqueness; tall stalks of corn, mammoth
squashes, huge apples and potatoes want the beauty and quality that
belong to them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections
of a county fair-house; piles of melons fail of their poetry on a
wooden floor, and heaps of grapes cannot assert themselves in a very
bacchanal profusion against the ignominy of being spread upon long
tables and ticketed with the names of their varieties and exhibitors.

Ludlow glanced at them, to right and left, as he walked through the
long, barn-like building, and took in with other glances the inadequate
decorations of the graceless interior. His roving eye caught the
lettering over the lateral archways, and with a sort of contemptuous
compassion he turned into the Fine Arts Department.

The fine arts were mostly represented by photographs and crazy quilts;
but there