the strident forms and colors made. He was interested in the
insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the
Corinthian front of an old theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars,
and flouting its dishonored pediment. The colossal effigies of the fat
women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas
of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here
and there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness
of the stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines
that narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of
the avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and
bought and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled,
around, below, above--were features of the frantic panorama that
perpetually touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy. Accident
and then exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary
effect; the play of energies as free and planless as those that force
the forest from the soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for
survival, with the stronger life persisting over the deformity, the
mutilation, the destruction, the decay of the weaker. The whole at
moments seemed to him lawless, godless; the absence of intelligent,
comprehensive purpose in the huge disorder, and the violent struggle
to subordinate the result to the greater good, penetrated with its dumb
appeal the consciousness of a man who had always been too self-enwrapped
to perceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness must always
lead.

But there was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague
discomfort, however poignant, in his half recognition of such facts; and
he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of the
neglected opportunities of painters in that locality. He said to himself
that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars,
trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengers going
and coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the
railroad tracks overhead, and amid the spectacular approach of the
streets that open into the square, he would have it down in his
sketch-book at once. He decided simultaneously that his own local
studies must be illustrated, and that he must come with the artist and
show him just which bits to do, not knowing that the two arts can never
approach the same material fro