The Artist’s Dream.

“Why, these girls;” I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been about a hundred of them.  There was not a plain one among the lot.  Many of them I should have called beautiful.  They were selling flowers and fruit, all kinds of fruit—cherries, strawberries, rosy-cheeked apples, luscious grapes—all freshly picked and sparkling with dew.  The gendarme said he had never seen any girls—not in this particular square.  Referring casually to the blood of saints and martyrs, he said he would like to see a few girls in that town worth looking at.  In the square itself sat six motherly old souls round a lamp-post.  One of them had a moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but in other respects, I have no doubt, was all a woman should be.  Two of them were selling fish.  That is they would have sold fish, no doubt, had anyone been there to buy fish.  The gaily clad thousands of eager purchasers pictured in the postcard were represented by two workmen in blue blouses talking at a corner, mostly with their fingers; a small boy walking backwards, with the idea apparently of not missing anything behind him, and a yellow dog that sat on the kerb, and had given up all hope—judging from his expression—of anything ever happening again.  With the gendarme and myself, these four were the only living creatures in the square.  The rest of the market consisted of eggs and a few emaciated fowls hanging from a sort of broom handle.

“And where’s the cathedral?” I asked the gendarme.  It was a Gothic structure in the postcard of evident antiquity.  He said there had once been a cathedral.  It was now a brewery; he pointed it out to me.  He said he thought some portion of the original south wall had been retained.  He thought the manager of the brewery might be willing to show it to me.

“And the fountain?” I demanded, “and all these doves!”

He said there had been talk of a fountain.  He believed the design had already been prepared.

I took the next train back.  I do not now travel much out of my way to see the original of the picture postcard.  Maybe others have had like experience and the picture postcard as a guide to the Continent has lost its value.

The dealer has fallen back upon the eternal feminine.  The postcard collector is confined to girls.  Through the kindness of correspondents I possess myself some fifty to a hundred girls, or perhaps it would be more correct to say one girl in fifty to a hundred different hats.  I have her in big hats, I have her in small hats, I have her in no hat at all.  I have her smiling, and I have her looking as if she had lost her last sixpence.  I have her overdressed, I have her decidedly underdressed, but she is much the same girl.  Very young men cannot have too many of her, but myself I am getting tired of her.  I suppose it is the result of growing old.