I had been conscious in other days of a desire to be a tapestry man
and sit with the merry tapestry lady smiling there. All tapestry people
look incredibly happy, for in tapestry etiquette it's bad form to be
tragic. Even their battles are comedy battles, as you can see by the
faces of the war-horses that they have a strong sense of humor; but
these particular tapestry friends of mine were the gayest I ever met,
and I wanted Miss Van Buren to make their acquaintance.

To reach the room, through another also representing a tapestry world,
we had to perform a dreadful surgical operation on the abdomen of a
Roman emperor by opening a door in the middle of it, and, as the Mariner
said, the size of the next room gave the same sort of shock that Jonah
must have had when he arrived in the whale.

If I had shown her that tapestry garden, Miss Van Buren would have
feigned indifference; but I left her to Starr, and from a distance had
the chastened pleasure of hearing her say to him the things I should
have liked her to say to me.

Afterwards I swept the party away to the University, preparing their
minds to expect no architectural splendors.

"Leiden is our most famous university," I said. "But we have no streets
of beautiful old colleges, no lovely gardens. You see, Oxford and
Cambridge are universities round which towns have gathered, whereas
Leiden was a city long before William the Silent gave its people choice,
as a reward for their heroic defense, of freedom from taxes or a
university. When they said they'd have the university, the thing was to
get it. Money wasn't plentiful, and here was an old monastery, empty and
ready for use--a building whose simplicity would have appealed to
William in his later days."

It was not until they had this apology well in their heads that I
ushered them into the bare, red-brick courtyard so full of memories for
me, and here I buckled on my armor of defense.

"Our universities have produced great men, though they've given them no
Gothic buildings or fairy gardens. Where will you find more illustrious
names than Scaliger, Grotius, and Oliver Goldsmith?--lots of others,
too. Why, Niebuhr said of our old hall that no place is so memorable in
the history of science."

Trying to appear impressed, the three ladies, followed by Starr, trailed
into the building, deserted at this hour; and it was the artist's quick
eye that first caught the eccentric merit of the famous caricatures
lining t