speed; and we were whirled over the cobblestones and
tramlines and round trams, horsemen, wagons, rival cars and everything
else in a breath-taking rush. "I get in these things," said Hosea,
"saying to myself, If I don't come out of this alive, then I shan't."
We got out alive. The Consul's workshop (it was perhaps known by a
more dignified name) was in a scrubby street; and the young man in
charge had my sympathy. However, it was not my fault that he was being
slowly roasted.

That call left Hosea at liberty to explore the town. We walked on and
on, looking at the shops, and be it acknowledged at the beauties who went
by, until we arrived at the small park over which the Museum rises to that
southern sun, ornate and massy. Here we entered to spend the afternoon
among a few visitors and as many official incumbents. We entered solemnly
resolved to find a Palace of Art--Hosea putting away from him all his
connection with ships and the worries of that next necessity, the "charter
party."

Plaster casts and original statuary were plentiful in the Museum. The eye
of the weary mariners rested none too long upon these. The multitude of
paintings, however, were considered gently and methodically: Hosea would
stand before the weakest trying to comprehend the artist's intention,
and to claim something in his daub as a virtue. Sometimes he would put
on his eyeglass to survey the subject. To me, there seemed no such
quality here--I speak as a scribe, without authority--as there was
quantity.

There have been many energetic and accomplished administerings of paint,
but to what purpose? The eternal allegory, demanding one nude figure or
more, and justifying by the general level Hosea's praise of a well-known
picture called "September Morning," or sweetened description of evening,
with its cows coming home under its warped moon, its ploughman in a vague
acre, and the rest. Was this the southern genius?

One or two modern pictures here revealed a strength and idiosyncrasy
beyond almost all the rest. A portrait of six youths, drawn with fierce
intensity of colour and of line, expressing distinctions of character
in subtle vital sharpness, long detained me. Another untypical picture,
as recent as the last, was based upon a rustic festival or ritual with
which I of course was unacquainted; but the epic lives of peasant men and
women in their long combat with the stern giver of grain were legible in
the strange georgic faces and the my