When Miss Beam came to release me, I was quite sorry to go, and said so.
“Ah!” she replied; “then there is something in my system after all!”
I walked back to the town murmuring (inaccurately as ever) the lines:—
Can I see another’s woe
And not share their sorrow too?
O no, never can it be,
Never, never, can it be.
On the Track of Vermeer
Not long ago the papers contained a little paragraph stating that Herr Bredius, the curator of the Mauritshuis Gallery at the Hague, had just returned from a journey of exploration in Russia, bringing back with him over a hundred valuable pictures of the Dutch School which he had discovered there, in country and city mansions and even in farmhouses; for the Russian collectors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as is well known, greatly esteemed and desired (as who must not?) Dutch art. That was all that the paragraph said, and since that was all we may feel quite sure that among those hundred and more pictures there was nothing from the divinely gifted hand of Jan Vermeer of Delft; because the discovery of a new picture by Jan Vermeer of Delft is something not merely for mention in a paragraph but among the special news—something with which to agitate the cables of the world.