They were only three-McFarlane, Anthony and Thompson, shall I call them?-but they had not journeyed all the way from Munich to talk about "the boys" and to drop sentimental tears over old love tales. They were off on an Easter holiday and meant to make the most of it. Because Duveneck was Duveneck they gave up the gayer cafés in the Piazza to be with him in the sleepy old Orientale. But they were not going to let it stay a sleepy old Orientale if they could help themselves.

Their very first evening Duveneck called for two glasses of milk-to steady his nerves, he said, though he politely attributed the unsteadiness not to this new excitement but to the tea he had been drinking. People drifted to our room from outside and from the new room to see what the noise was about, until there was not a table to be had. The old Englishman and his son put down the Standard and laughed with us. The caramei man went away with an empty tray, I do believe the only time he was ever bought out in his life, and McFarlane treated us all to tamarindo to drink with the fruit, and he wound up his horrible extravagance by buying a copy of the Venetian paper "the boys" used to call the Barabowow. It was nothing short of a Venetian orgy.

Nor did the transformation end here. The men from Munich were so smart, especially McFarlane, in white waistcoat, with a flower in his button-hole and a gold-headed cane in his hand, that we were shocked into the consciousness of our shabbiness. Duveneck, who, until then, had been happy in an old ulster with holes in the pockets and rips in the seams, dazzled the café by appearing in a jaunty spring overcoat. J. exchanged his old trousers with a green stain of acid down the leg for the new pair he had hitherto worn only when he went to call on the Bronsons or to dine with Mr. Horatio Brown, where I could not go because I was so much more hopelessly unprepared to dine anywhere outside the Panada or the Kitchen of the Casa Kirsch. But in the Merceria I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice which bored the men from Munich to extinction-really they were so bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to the caramei man as the town's one excitement. I thought the illuminations on Easter Sunday evening, when the Piazza was "a fairyland in the night," and the music deafened us, and the Bengal lights blinded us, would help to give them a livelier impression; but, though they came with us to Florian's, it was plain they pitied us for being so pleased.

They couldn't, for the life of them, see why the place had been so cracked up by Ruskin. Nothing was right. The Piazza was just simply the town's meeting place and centre of gossip, like the country village store, only on a more architectural and uncomfortable scale. The canals were breeding holes for malaria. The streets wouldn't be put up with as alleys at home. The language was not worth learning. At the Panada, after we had given our order for dinner, McFarlane would murmur languidly 'Lo stesso' and declare it to be the one useful word in the Italian dictionary; to this Johnson added a mysterious 'Sensa crab' when Rossi suggested 'piccoli fees' under the delusion that he was talking English; while Anthony was quite content with the vocabulary the other two supplied him. The climate was as deplorable: either wet and cold, when the Italian scaldino wasn't a patch on the German stove and a gondola became a freezing machine; or warm and enervating when they couldn't keep awake.

They dozed in their gondola, they yawned in St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace and in all the other churches and palaces, and in front of all the old doorways and bridges and boat-building yards and traghettos and fishing boats and wells and "bits" that Camillo, their gondolier, was inhuman enough to wake them up to look at. The beauty of Venice was exaggerated, or if they did come to a "subject" that made them pull their sketch books out of their pockets, Camillo was at once bothering them to do it from just where Guardi, or Canaletto, or Rico, or Whistler, or Ruskin, or some other old boy had painted, etched, or drawn it-Whistler alone had finished Venice for every artist who came after him and they were tired of his very name, and never wanted to have his etchings and pastels thrown in their faces again. What they would like to do was to discover the Italian town or village where no artist had ever been seen and the word art had never been uttered.

But it was Venetian painting that got most on their nerves. They had given it a fair chance, they protested. "Trot out your Tintorettos," they said to Camillo every morning, and he carried them off to the Palace, and the Academy, and more churches than they thought there were in the world, and at last to the Scuola di San Rocco. And there a solemn man in spectacles took them in hand. They said to him too: "Trot our your Tintorettos," and he led them up to a big, dingy canvas, and they said: "Trot out your next," and they went the rounds of them all, and they asked, "Where's your Duveneck?" and he said he had never heard of Duveneck, and they said, "Why, he's here!" and they left him hunting, and were back in their gondola in ten minutes, and they guessed they could do with Rubens! I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and my highly intellectual friends at home, religiously studying Baedeker and reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich talking of art and of Venice. And I must have been painfully scandalized had I not got so much further on with my education as to have a glimmering of the truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British public-that an artist knows more about art than the man who isn't an artist, and has the best right to an opinion on the subject.

Perhaps their disappointment in Venice was the reason of their preoccupation with Munich. Certainly "Now, at Munich" was the beginning and end of the talk as "when 'the boys' were here" had been before they came. They would not admit that anything good could exist outside of Munich. I remember Duveneck once suggesting that Paris was the best place for the student, to whom it was a help just to see what was going on around him.

"But what does go on round the student there?" McFarlane interrupted. "It's all fads in Paris. What do they talk about in Paris to-day but values? [This, remember, was more than a quarter of a century ago.] That's all they teach the student, all they think of. Look at Bisbing's picture last year. They all raved over it, said it was the clou of the Salon, medalled it, bought it for the Luxembourg, and I don't know what all. And what was it?-Pale green sheep in the foreground, pale green mountains in the background, so pale you could shoot peas through them. That's what you have to do now to make a success in Paris-get your values so that you can shoot peas through 'em. And what will it be to-morrow? And what help is it to the student, anyway?"

But one thing certain is, that whatever the fads and movements in the Paris studios happened to be, the American student in those days did see what was going on in Paris, and just to see, just to feel it, was, as Duveneck held, a help, an inspiration. To-day, living in his own pensions, studying in his own schools, loafing in his own clubs, he does not take any interest in what is going on outside of them and will talk about what "the Frenchmen are doing" as if he were still in Kalamazoo or Oshkosh.

What the student, in Duveneck's and McFarlane's time saw going on round him in Munich was, as well as I could make out, chiefly balls and pageants. To this day I cannot help thinking of life in Munich as one long spectacle and dance. Duveneck, who could talk with calmness of his painting, was stirred to animation when he recalled the costumes he had invented for himself and his friends. He could not conceal his pride in the success of a South Sea Islander he had designed, the effect achieved by the simple means of burnt Sienna rubbed into the poor man, but so vigorously that it took months to get it out again, and a blanket which he mislaid towards morning so that his walk home at dawn, like a savage skulking in the shadows, was a triumph of realism. Pride, too, coloured Duveneck's account of the appearance of the Socialist Carpenter of his creation who made a huge sensation by inciting to riot in the streets of an elaborate Old Munich-the origin of Old London and Old Paris and all the sham Old Towns that Exhibitions have long since staled for us. But his masterpiece was the Dissipated Gentleman, like all masterpieces a marvel of simplicity-hired evening clothes, a good long roll in the muddiest gutter on the way to the ball, and it was done; but the art, Duveneck said, was in the rolling, which in this case, under his direction, was so masterly that at the door the Dissipated Gentleman was mistaken for the real thing and, if friends had not come up in the nick of time, the door would have been shut in his face.

Duveneck was as enthusiastic over the Charles V. ball, though all the artists of Munich contributed to its splendour, working out their costumes with such respect for truth and so regardless of cost that for months and years afterwards not a bit of old brocade or lace was to be had in the antiquity shops of Bavaria. And the students were responsible for the siege of an old castle outside the town, and in their arch?ological ardour persuaded the Museum to lend the armour and arms of the correct date, and, in their appreciation of the favour, fought with so much restraint that the casualties were a couple of spears snapped. And, in my recollection, their recollections stood for such truth and gorgeousness that when England, years afterwards, took to celebrating its past with pageants, more than once I found myself thinking how much better they order these things in Munich!

And from the studios came the inspiration for that ball Munich talks of to this day in which all the nations were represented. There was a Hindu temple, a Chinese pagoda, and an Indian wigwam. But the crowning touch was the Esquimaux hut. Placed in a hall apart, at the foot of a great stairway, it was built of some composition in which pitch was freely used, lit by tallow candles, and hung with herrings offered for sale by nine Esquimaux dressed in woollen imitation of skins with the furry side turned out. All evening the hut was surrounded, only towards midnight could the crowd be induced to move on to some fresh attraction. In the moment's lull, one of the Esquimaux was tying up a new line of herrings when he brushed a candle with his arm. In a second he was blazing. Another ran to his rescue. In another second the hut was a furnace and nine men were in flames, with pitch and wool for fuel. One of the few people still lounging about the hut, fearing a panic, gave the signal to the band, who struck up Carmen. Never since, McFarlane said, had he listened to the music of Carmen, never again could he listen to it, without seeing the burning hut, the men rushing out of it with the flames leaping high above them, tearing at the blazing wool, in their agony turning and twisting as in some wild fantastic dance, while above the music he could hear the laughter of the crowd, who thought it a joke-a new scene in the spectacle.

He snatched a rug from somewhere and tried to throw it over one of the men, but the man flew past to the top of the great stairway. There he was seized and rolled over and over on the carpet until the flames were out. He got up, walked downstairs, asked for beer, drank it to the dregs, and fell dead with the glass in his hand-the first to die, the first freed from his agony. Of the nine, but two survived. Seven lay with their hut, a charred heap upon the ground, before the laughing crowd realized what a pageant of horror Fate had planned for them.

Munich stories, before the night was over, had to be washed down with Munich beer, which, at that time as still, I fancy, was best at Bauer's. By some unwritten law, inscrutable as the written, it was decreed that, though I might sit all evening the only woman at our table in the Orientale-oftener than not the only woman in the café-it was not "the thing" for me to go on to Bauer's. Therefore, first, the whole company would see me home. It was a short stroll along the Riva, but the Lagoon, dim and shadowy, stretched away beyond us, dimmer islands resting on its waters, the lights of the boats sprinkling it with gold under the high Venetian sky sprinkled with stars; and so beautiful was it, and so sweet the April night, that the men from Munich could not hold out against the enchantment of Venice in spring. I felt it a concession when McFarlane admitted the loveliness of Venice by starlight, and his languor dropped from him under the spell, and I knew the game of boredom was up when, in this starlight, he decided that, after all, there might be more in the Tintorettos than he thought if only he had time to study them. But Easter holidays do not last for ever, and the day soon came when the men from Munich had to go back to where all was for the best in the best of all towns, but where no doubt, on the principle that we always prefer what we have not got at the moment, they told "the fellows" in the Bier Kellars that only in Venice was life worth while, that Rubens was dingy, and that they guessed they could do with Tintoretto.