be small enough to be boxed and put into one's pocket, or at least into the pocket of one's automobile. If only our stomachs could be contracted to match the size of our kitchenettes, but our appetites remain as obstinately capacious as when I munched cookies in Aunt Cora's capacious kitchen.

You see, the kitchenette is one of our many modern evasions of plain human facts that the preceding generations accepted. The kitchenette denies the truth that all people enjoy eating, and that many women enjoy cooking, if only convention will permit them to obey that impulse. The whole theory of the kitchenette is that no woman likes to cook, and therefore wishes to spend as little time as possible in a room designed to cook in. And this matter of saving time and spending time bumps one right into an important distinction between yesterday and to-day, between kitchen and kitchenette. Every week some new invention for saving time is put on the market. The reason we have so little time is that we are so miserly about saving it that there is no longer any time in active circulation. Now the past age of kitchens like Aunt Cora's, and of women like Aunt Cora, descendants both from pioneer New England, was concerned not with saving time but with spending it. People felt that time was an exhaustless supply, and so they had every kind of invention for spending it. In those luxurious first-settler days they had leisure to squander on all sorts of self-indulgence like the self-indulgence of raising their own vegetables and their own babies, the self-indulgence of cooking their own food, above all, the self-indulgence of staying at home in their own cheery kitchens.

The inventors of the kitchenette argue that it affords opportunity for other things than housekeeping. I regard that argument carefully while at the same time I slip back into my ten-year-old self and also regard carefully Aunt Cora and her kitchen. Those other things, for which a kitchenette leaves a woman free, did not Aunt Cora have them? Reading? I know no one now who reads as widely as did Aunt Cora. Hospitality? I know no one now who has as many friends as did Aunt Cora. She entertained them always in the kitchen; she had a personality so compelling that friends of every social degree would have thronged to her even if she had entertained them in the ash-pan.

Recreation? Well, Aunt Cora was too placidly busy to think much about recreation. She had, of course, the refreshment of a change of work, for her kitchen was not continuously kitchen, it was sometimes a weaving room, sometimes, at hog-killing time, a butcher's shop, sometimes a laundry, sometimes a dressmaking establishment. Aunt Cora put more zest into these pursuits than most of us to-day put into recreation. Travel? No, Aunt Cora was tied too closely to her kitchen to travel. Yet, for her unspoiled imagination, the letters from far-travelled friends set Egypt and Cathay down in her kitchen. She voyaged farther than many a thick-brained globetrotter.

The kitchenette has come and come to stay. Only in memory does Aunt Cora's kitchen exist, a room of spell and charm and personality. I wonder whether that roomy, spicy kitchen made Aunt Cora what she was, or whether Aunt Cora made the kitchen what it was. But I know that the word kitchenette evokes in my mind no aroma, no picture, no personality.

I

LIVE on a street inhabited by operasingers and musicians. At this moment I can hear one soprano singing "Carmen," another the aria from "Madame Butterfly." The people below me, evidently a variety-theatre troupe, are indulging in a

Half-Heard

mixed chorus of "Hearts and Music Flowers," with restful piano interludes of barn-dances dating back some eight or nine years. From down the street a way some passages of a familiar Chopin nocturne come in with peculiar strength and the insistence of sincere emotion. And the ensemble of all these sounds is entrancing. I have but one fault to find: the effect would be improved if I did not know the names and characters of the various ingredients making up this musical deliciousness. Now and then I am lured off into the atmosphere of one song or another, and made temporarily forgetful of the rest, only to be jerked back into reality when some loud and tremulous lady cuts clear across the notes I am trying to hear with another series whose strong intent I can neither doubt nor avoid.

Yet I know that with proper practice I can train myself to hear what I hear and nothing more-to refrain from supplying a

well-known song with missing notes lost out in reaching my fourth floor front. The only mental additions I intend to allow are those few amalgamating elements of harmony that can turn the combined forces of "Carmen," "Butterfly," and "Turkey in the Straw" into a complex and masterful concerto, no part or theme of which intrudes with familiarity upon any other part.

Perhaps you think I am describing a particular sort of Bedlam, and have grown a little mad in the doing, from the effect of living in it too long. I hasten to assure you that I am not mad at all, and that from earliest childhood I have loved music mingled and half-heard. There is a mysteriousness in it never found in technically complete and perfect music. I have no sympathy with those hopeless people who "cannot stand the sound of practising." They lack imagination and constructive power. They lack, too, the thrilling associative and assortive skill that can link many fragments of sound to fragments of memory-that can recall with all the old keenness bits of emotional and æsthetic experience attached to all musical sounds, which enrich us as long as they remain unforgotten. They are unfortunate who miss the exquisite pleasure of inventing variations around and about repeated passages. They have never indulged in the crude but exciting pastime of whistling or singing a secondary theme, interlaced with the main theme of some one's composition, played over and over by at hopeful musician. They have never taken the golden chance to make use of a performer's repeated mistakes-to weave them into a new whole-to justify them according to the laws of music.

Many of us will recall the halls of music in our schools and colleges, the practice rooms bursting with concerted renditions of many melodies on some warm spring day, when the windows were open on grass beginning to show green, lilacs budding, and the rich smell of earth freed of frost. In later spring days you will remember these unnamed tunes, and always, when you chance to hear them practised by some one, in any weather, they will bring back to you the poignance of those other times. Often you would ask yourself "What piece is that?" and swear to ask the player if ever you should meet him, but you never did find out. To this day you don't know, and it doesn't matter. Sometime, on a concert programme perhaps,

you will find out. Music doesn't get lost. It turns up again and again, and with it the gathered-up atmosphere of all the conditions under which you have ever heard it.

But I do not mean to pass too far away from conglomerate music, made up of just such fragments as you may have retained from college days, and renewed again on such streets as mine. A certain school lecturer of my childhood used to sit on the piazza of our practice-building and listen by the hour to the earnest thumps of many piano students and the earnest squeaks of as many beginners at violin.

"When I have time," he was wont to say, "I intend to write a symphony from this; only I shall have to leave out those three opening chords of the Rachmaninoff Prelude. You hear? Dum-Dum-DUM !— and so on. That's the only thing I know out of all they're playing, and it's too insistent. I'll have to wait until that student stops. It's sad, though. Some one's always playing that thing, and it spoils the rest." So it is here in my apartment; some one is always singing the "Toreador Song," or drumming out a minor version of "The Love Nest," or struggling with a Bach fugue, or playing that same Rachmaninoff Prelude, and my uncreated concerto must wait until he stops. The other sounds, truly half-heard, fit together well enough. Very little in the way of connectives need be added to satisfy the laws of music.

Do I know anything about the laws of music? Nothing whatsoever. But that does not keep me from arranging my concerto, any more than it kept the school lecturer from planning his symphony. As I remember, he lectured on Greek history, and knew as much about symphonies as I do about concertos. But he and I and the rest of us who love music unnamed, conglomerate, and half-heard, have one advantage over all really musical people. We escape the exquisite torture they are forced to endure at every hand, and at every moment, if they happen to live on streets like mine. Their erudition renders them helpless, taunts them, and deprives them of the deep pleasure I am experiencing at this minute; for now, for the first time, the combined talent of at least ten people contributes to my rapt attention a concerto unmatched in the history of musical composition, wholly and satisfyingly unfamiliar, magnificent, and complete! If I could only write it down!

G

ILBERT STUART from his originality, his wit, his whimsies, and his signal ability, is one of the most interesting characters in the history of early American art, as well as one of its most commanding figures. If it be true that poeta nascitur non fit, it may with equal truth be said of the true artist that he is born, not made. No more striking example of the truth of this axiom is to be found than in the life of Stuart, or of the eccentricities of the old fairy who is said to preside over the cradles of the sons and daughters of genius.

Even for those who make no special study of

biographer describes them, at the head of Petaquamscott Pond in the Narragansett country in Rhode Island, shut in by trees and far away from the din and stir of the world stands an old-fashioned, gambrelroofed and low-portalled house by the side of a tiny stream. At the snuff-mill, which was

the effects of heredity and environment, the vagaries of the output of genius in certain families and amid uncongenial surroundings is a subject that cannot fail to interest the student of life and character. The English artist, Sir Thomas Lawrence, amusing himself by making pencil sketches of those whom he served with chops and potatoes in his father's inn, the White Lion, in Bristol, is even less remarkable than the evolution of the talent of Gilbert Stuart from a Narragansett snuff grinding-mill.

The ruins of the old house and mill near Saunderstown, where Gilbert Stuart passed his early years, are still to be seen or, as his

afterward used for grinding corn, the elder Stuart, also Gilbert, presumably led an honest if somewhat wheezy existence, and to the little cottage near by he brought his bride, Elizabeth Anthony, a bright and beautiful woman. Here Gilbert Stuart, the artist, was born, December 3,

1755. From his mother he gained the rudiments of an education, and from her he seems to have imbibed something even better than actual learning, an ardent desire and ambition to acquire knowledge.

The first glimpse that we have of Stuart away from the snuff grinding-mill, is in Newport, where he was studying Latin under the Reverend George Bissit, assistant minister of Trinity Church, and making sketches in charcoal or chalk on every fence, slab, or tail-board that came within reach of his eager, skilful little fingers. As there was not money in the family treasury to give the clever lad the art education that he longed

for, he was fortunate in gaining the friendship and valuable counsel of a Scotch artist, Cosmo Alexander, who took Stuart to Scotland with him, where he studied some months in the University of Glasgow. His studies were, however, cut short by the

Robert Morris.

guests, offered to interview the stranger, who was described as a handsome young man in a fashionable green coat. This interview was a fortunate happening, as Mr. Wharton was a friend of young Stuart's uncle, Mr. Anthony. Thus introduced, Mr.

death of his patron, and he returned home to paint some portraits, among others those of his uncle, Mr. Joseph Anthony, a prominent merchant of Philadelphia, and of other members of his family.

Having a great desire to study under his countryman, Benjamin West, Stuart again set sail for foreign shores, arriving in London in 1775. The story of the young artist's introduction to Benjamin West is pleasantly told by Miss Jane Stuart. Mr. West was entertaining some of his friends at dinner when a servant told him that some one wished to see him, whose name he did not know but who was from America. Mr. Joseph Wharton, of Philadelphia, one of the

West, who was the soul of kindness, warmly welcomed the young artist, and learning of his desire to study with him invited him to make his home in his own family. In this congenial and delightful entourage Stuart met all the prominent English artists of the day and was associated with John Trumbull, of Connecticut, who was also a student of Benjamin West. So rapid was the progress made by Stuart that he was soon able to establish himself in his own studio. West, with his characteristic generosity, said to him, after he had painted a full-length portrait of himself, "You have done well, Stuart, very well; now all you have to do is to go home and do better," which advice the young artist followed to the letter, and soon outstripped his teacher.

Having had men so distinguished among his sitters as Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds, Stuart soon became the fashion of the hour. Money rolled in upon him as he received a price for

his portraits exceeded only by the sums paid to Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. It was said of him that in London the orders which came to him from distinguished men and women were more numerous than he could fill, and that at one time he limited his engagements to six sitters a day. Genial, witty, pleasure-loving, and with no idea of economy, all his industry and good-fortune failed to enable Stuart to keep pace with his extravagant expenditures. His house in London was upon a scale quite beyond his means. A curious story is related in connection with Stuart's dinners. He began by inviting forty-two guests to dine with him, poets, painters, authors, musicians,

actors, the most interesting men of the London of his day. Finding these large dinners unsatisfactory he explained to his friend: "I can't have you all every day, but I will have seven of you to dine with me each day in the week, and I have contrived it so that the parties shall vary without further trouble. I have put up seven cloak pins in my hall, so as the first seven who come in may hang up their cloaks and hats; the eighth seeing the pins full will go away and will probably attend earlier the next day. . . ." The compact was understood without the trouble of naming or inviting. A different company appeared every day, and there were no jealousies about a preference being given to any one.

Finding it necessary to change his mode of living, and having a great desire to paint a portrait of Washington, Stuart came to America in 1792. He remained in New York for some months and evidently painted some portraits there. Then, in order to carry out his cherished desire, he removed to Philadelphia while Congress was in session in that city. Although we find no entries in regard to the President's sittings in his diaries and letters prior to 1796, Stuart's biographer, Mr. George Mason, fixes the date of his arrival in Philadelphia from that given in a letter written by Mrs. John Jay to her husband, in which she says, November 15, 1794: "In ten days he [Stuart] is to go to Philadelphia to take a likeness of the President."

In a note written by the President to the artist, dated Philadelphia, April 11, 1796, he says: "I am under promise to Mrs. Bingham to sit for you to-morrow." While in the Quaker City, Gilbert Stuart had his studio at the southeast corner of Fifth and Chestnut Streets. It was probably in this studio that Stuart's first portrait of Washington was painted, but whether this was the Vaughan portrait, or the full-length, called the Bingham portrait, now in the

Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, is a question still discussed by experts.

Stuart, who like all great portrait-painters, was a reader of character, was so impressed by the personality of the President that he quite lost his self-possession and

Mrs. Thomas Lea.

much as he had desired to paint the portrait of the great man, it was not until after several meetings that he felt himself sufficiently at home with his sitter to do justice to his subject. Although Mr. Stuart had met the President at a reception in his own house and been accosted by him with the dignified urbanity natural to him, the artist declared that no human being had ever awakened in him the sentiment of reverence to such a degree. Those who knew Stuart well said that he had the power of dominating his sitters, and so agreeably that they were not aware of the fact. His readiness as a talker, his fund of humor and anecdote, high flow of animal spirits, and wonderful insight into character enabled him generally to get his subjects