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friend. He said if I didn't tell you right off, it might get to you some other way 'n' be a' awful blow. He said he had to go to Meadville to-morrow, so he might mention it down-town to-night, 'n' 'most any one might let it drop in on you. I see the p'int o' his reasonin', 'n' so—"

"Susan," said the friend, her feelings completely overflowing all bounds—"oh, Susan, are you really a-goin' to marry—"

Susan's expression altered triumphantly.

"Why, Mrs. Lathrop," she said, with keen enjoyment, "it ain't me 's he wants to marry; it's you!"

PHILADELPHIA'S CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN ART

BY HARRISON S. MORRIS

Managing Director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

NTO Penn's good old village of tree-bordered streets and undeviating angles, one day, about 1756, came Benjamin West, and founded American art. He had come from the neighboring Springfield, sequestered in the forest beside Ridley Creek, where he had struggled with a racial distrust of beauty, and overcome a thousand hindrances of the primeval woods. Destiny had marked him out for an artist, but she had ordained him to surmount obstacles severe enough to justify his birthright. He had neither the simplest tools of his calling, artistic associations, nor helpful traditions. Brushes and colors he found in primitive sources taught him by the red men, comradeship in aims and taste he formed among the enlightened merchants and scholars of Philadelphia, and traditions he himself made and left in the town. To us of the Quaker City of to-day it is no new thing to take quiet satisfaction in the triumphs of our painters in the English capital. Sargent, at least by parentage a fel low-citizen, Abbey, John McLure Hamil ton, and Mrs. Merritt, have carried our drab standard to the citadel itself. But in the middle eighteenth century, when Pennsylvania was a dependent colony and Philadelphia only a frontier hamlet, the spectacle of a colonial lad stepping from this obscurity and snatching honors from the elect was startling at home and an audacious trespass abroad. West, however, was a darling of destiny. He had begun în Philadelphia a career which was to change, in many respects, the ideals of the art of his time. He spent a brief period in Italy, where his inclinations were confirmed by what he saw, and then in London took up that lifelong triumph which bloomed, under the royal patronage of George III, into noble compositions that enriched English art and dominated our own painting for a hundred years. Yet West was at heart the simple Quaker he was born to be. In spite of a king's friendship and of successes that even the haughtiest English painters envied, his gentle nature turned with perennial affection to the dear land of his birth. IIe declined knighthood; he stood firm in his loyalty to his home in the war for freedom; and he sent back, as the twilight of his years closed about him, a rich token of his love in that impressive canvas, "Christ Healing the Sick," which hangs in the Pennsylvania Hospital, but is the heritage of the whole city. Even as late as 1809 it was characteristic of him to write: "Philadelphia I cannot name without being interested in all that has a connection with that city."

What wonder, then, that the youngsters of the brush should seek out this elder craftsman when the artistic tide of those