I USED to pride myself upon my power to read faces casually encountered, which is, I suppose, but another way of saying that I used to be young. Whole character sketches could I make out of the curve of the lips, the lines of the forehead, the contour of cheek and of brow, and, as I never again saw most of the people in question, and never really knew them, nobody was ever the wiser or the worse for my minute interpretations. It is only lately that I have begun to suspect that my instinct was more fallible than I had thought, that Dame Nature is a far more subtle lady than I had dreamed, and that, in creating faces, as elsewhere, she follows her usual method of almost wholly concealing her meaning by partially revealing it. Misfit Faces Not long since I went to a great meeting-I will not say what, I will not say where-in which certain questions of civic reform were being debated in the presence of potentates, powers, and even trust magnates. Against the complacent faces of the boodlers and grafters, all of whom wore that direct and manly gaze we are taught to associate with honesty of character, one face stood out, narrow-eyed, a twist in the nose giving the whole countenance a sinister expression, a face that nine people out of ten would have picked out as that of the villain of the piece; yet it was the face of the one upright man there, whose salt of civic virtue will, peradventure, for he holds high office, save a whole city. I knew that he was good only because he did not, as the others did, talk loudly of the Virtues. It would make a noble theme for a novel or a play, rivalling in pathos Cyrano de Bergerac, the life-long fight of a good man against the contour of his outer shell; his final proof in deeds that he was not the villain that, by some touch of physical irony, he looked. Is it from actual observation that we have grown to associate certain inner qualities with certain characteristics of cut and of coloring, or are fiction and drama responsible for our conventional beliefs? No amount of enlight enment can keep us from identifying golden hair with innocence; the black locks and heavy brow of the arch villain of melodrama, the square chin of the man of decision, the straightforward gaze of conscious virtue-all these time-worn generalities dominate, though we do not know it, our observation. If we had the use of our eyes we should see, I fancy, that, in real life, the villain wears a look of conscious virtue more convincingly than does any one else, and that, unlike his image in fiction, he almost never realizes that he is a villain. We hide our real vision under the shreds and patches of worn-out fancy, and I think that the angels would laugh if they could hear, as mayhap they do, our interpretation of those whom we see hurrying past us upon the street, or sitting beside us in railway trains, or, dare I add? at our own hearths. I recall an acquaintance who had a face like those painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and that means with more power of expression than anything else in the world except, perhaps, an unfinished sketch by Leonardo! The brown hair and eyes, the wistful curves of cheek and of chin, the mouth, whose delicate lips seemed always about to quiver, belonged to a simple, practical, American business woman who never in her life had felt one of the rare emotions which she suggested and aroused. She confessed to me once, and, as I looked at her amazing beauty, I marvelled at her words, that her face had been her greatest curse. "People expect me to be so-so remarkable," she said sadly, the simple, commonplace soul vainly trying to peep through the wonderful brown eyes, "and then, in a few days, they find me out." She had never discovered her true comrades, for they had all been frightened away by her glorified outer shell-and that, when you think of it, would make another good theme for a novel. Another problem concerning faces has puzzled me much. Which suffer more deeply, the ferocious-looking people who are mild inside, or the mild-looking people who are inwardly fierce? I recall more than one gentle spirit, forever imprisoned behind a New England nose, shut out from due sympathy, from appreciation, from understanding by a mere barricade of bone and cartilage. The hawklike beak and dove-like eyes are an all too common combination; the formidable jaw too often conceals from the casual observer an over-sensitive mouth, and I have noted that the most awe-inspiring giant stature may be accompanied by the shakiest arm and knee. It is just as unfair, and far more dangerous, the other way. The two meekest-looking old men I ever laid eyes upon were gory-minded anarchists, who were waiting, with an air of patriarchal calm, for a chance to throw bombs. I recall an elderly little lady, with a face like that of a worshipping medieval saint, calling out-she was an artist and had some excuse— for the blood of a missionary, an excellent American missionary, who had gone to teach the Japanese wood-carving! Who could have dreamed that, behind that illumined little countenance, the lust to kill lay hidden? In this list of contradictions belongs the imp across the street who acts on Sunday as choir boy, looking the part, and acts on week days in a fashion that I do not care to describe. Alas, I belong there myself! I, who inherited from one side of the family something of the look of the cherub, from the other, a bit of the mind of the wolf, feel that nature has given me an unfair advantage. The pious blue eye handed down from generations of ministerial ancestors veils all too completely a wicked and satiric temper that I got from the other side of the house. When I speak it is often as if the lamb had roared. I could have made myself, had I so chosen, a most complete villain without ever having anybody find me out. The most interesting case of belying mask that I ever encountered was this: Some years ago, in a country hotel, I chanced to meet a veteran of the Civil War, who had with him a son of seventeen or eighteen. It was whispered to me that the father had gone through untold sufferings as prisoner and afterward as fugitive in the South, and I wondered that his face bore so little trace of it all. It was impassive, non-committal, carefully expressionless; even the eyes, when the lids were reluctantly lifted, betrayed nothing of the closelyguarded secret. But the boy's, for some reason too deep for me to fathom, told all. In the appealing eyes, the wistful lines of mouth and forehead, was an eloquence of expression that belied the fresh young face. The child of his father's suffering, he suggested, merely I think in physical imprint, a depth of experience not his own. I have come to the conclusion that, in reality, very few people resemble themselves. Hoodwinking us is doubtless one of the ways in which Dame Nature amuses herself in her eternity of task. Think of the infinite variety possible to her infinite resources in that great kneading trough wherein she mixes souls and bodies, joining the slant eye and the saintly mouth, the lifted eyebrow and the praying lips; taking back in the chin what she grants in the forehead, contradicting herself, quizzing us, with that old challenge to find out if we can what it really means. Doubtless there are in all faces subtle indications of the soul behind, but I fancy that they are, for the most part, too fine for us to read, and that the great Mother of us all, because, perhaps, she likes to see us play at wisdom, with humor unexpected, often so pointed that it amounts to wit, constantly makes misfit faces for our misleading. Τ' HERE are many things to be said about the tipping habit. Most of them have perhaps been said. It is not denied that it lends itself to abuse. There are those stern-souled reformers who maintain that, like the tippling habit, the tipping habit is itself an abuse, and that the only way to reform it is to reform it, altogether. Many more there be who think that abusus non tollit usum, and that the temperance in tips may well stop short of total abstinence. But it is interesting and gratifying to observe that the recent suggestion of a certain politic convocation of publicans at Rome (not N. Y., but the Eternal City) has been universally repelled with rage and laughter. This was no less than a proposal that the publican should himself, like a brazen serpent or a golden calf, stand between the tipper and the tippee, that the plague of tipping might be stayed; should, in fact, erect himself into an almoner of his customers and distribute their gratuities, extending and withholding as he pleaseth. Regulating Tips. In sooth, "commercialism" has not issued in a more preposterous proposal. For the proposal sets at naught the whole philosophy and the whole psychology of tipping. The very point of the tip is that it operates to transfer the "condition of servitude," and to convert, for the period covered by the tip, the permanent servant of the landlord into the temporary servant of the "paying guest." The tippee acknowledges, or does not acknowledge, as the case may be, a divided duty. He must be prepared, if the occasion arises, to go against the interests of his permanent employer in the interest of his temporary employer. He must be prepared to recommend not only what his principal wishes to sell, but also what his principal does not wish to sell, if it be to the interest of his temporary employer to buy it. Nay, he must be prepared to discommend, if need be, what his regular employer may particularly wish to sell. When "Young Bailey," in "Martin Chuzzlewit," whispered through the keyhole to the two Miss Pecksniffs-"Fish to-morrow: just come: don't eat none of him"-" and with this spectral warning he vanished"—he was furnishing the classical instance of the function of a tippee. It does not matter that it does not appear that the Miss Pecksniffs feed him, and that the probability is that, more foemineo, they didn't. He was the typical tippee all the same. His honor rooted in dishonor stood, and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. the stranger; especially maddening when, after paying nasally in his inn-bill for "Attendance," he finds the entire staff of the establishment drawn up at the front door, with the connivance of the landlord, to certify that the formal payment he has just made is incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent. Nevertheless, he is not in the least likely to acquiesce in the ridiculous proposal that he shall hand over to a heartless and possibly corporate and incorporeal landlord. the "gratuity" for which he is thus not to receive even gratitude. That would be to deprive tipping of all its charm and poetry of personal relation. The divine Shakespeare's clown, who must have been a waiter, justly observed that "guerdon is better than remuneration." So it is, when it is the recognition that a waiter is not, as Charles Reade's chaplain puts it, a "scientific contrivance to make brute fling food to brute, instead of man handing it with a smile to grateful man." And, moreover, the tip, when personally conducted, may be and should be an instrument of moral and social discipline. The withholding or diminution of it should be a punishment, as the bestowal or enlargement of it a reward. Americans are too easy to make use of this invaluable agency, and their tips are but too apt to fall alike upon the just waiter and the unjust. Manifestly, Emerson was suffering the pangs of remorse for overtipping a bad waiter when he wrote: "Though I confess with shame that I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, yet it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold." However that may be, there is nothing whatever to be said for this proposition of the landlords to commercialize the last relic of feudalism, "the last enchantment of the middle age," by intercepting the dollar and thereby precluding the giver of it from the satisfaction of remarking the shining countenance of the temporary retainer, as, once more in the language of the divine ShakeDoubtless the British tip is maddening to speare, he doth "impeticos the gratillity.” The custom works oddly and sometimes awkwardly when there is nothing avowedly commercial in the relation; when, for example, private guests who are not paying guests have occasion to tip the servants. As when, for example, in an authentic instance, the guests of an English country house were solemnly warned by their host against spoiling "his" servants by excessive tipping, and the proper amount of their fees was indicated to them. This is what you might call a staggerer. Not that there was no need of it, for the British tiptaker is a cormorant, as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. Authenticated tales there are of English country houses in which the chiefs of the in-door and out-door staffs, the butler and the head gamekeeper, conspired to accept "nothing but paper," which is to say nothing short of five sterling pounds. But then England is the home and nursery of the tip, the country in which of all you can most readily "buy service," as Mr. Kipling hath it. MURAL DECORATION IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY OCIENCE has once more accepted the services of Art as collaborator, and a new, and very extensive, field is thrown open to the enterprise of the mural painters. How extensive may be inferred from the recent departure of the Natural History Museum in Central Park West in mounting on three of its walls in the great Esquimo Hall on the ground floor a long painted frieze devoted to the Frozen North. The length of the walls in halls and corridors in this Museum building is very great, as hundreds of weary sightseers have discovered, it is proposed, we believe, to extend this building over the whole area of the little park, from Seventy-seventh to Eightyfirst Streets, and from Eighth Avenue to Ninth. Since a beginning has been made, it is perhaps permissible to look forward to the ultimate decoration by skilful painters of all the walls of this ultimate building, and consequently of all these great scientific museums! The museums of art are much less adaptable for mural paintings, as conflicting in many VOL. XLV.-28 cases with the exhibits themselves, but the mission given this Arctic frieze of Mr. Frank Wilbert Stokes is to demonstrate the possibility of supplementing the material objects exhibited by a sort of painted synthesis or comprehensive presentation on the walls. In this mission it may be said to succeed, the visitor, entering this large rectangular hall, takes cognizance of the particular aspect of man's relations with Nature here illustrated, and immediately afterward perceives these incidents repeated on the wall but fitted into the cosmos. Consequently, he contemplates the sled, or the harpoon, with a clearer vision. The painter was fortunate in this, for the usual justification of a mural decoration that it completes the color harmony of the interiorwas quite denied him in this Polar omnium gatherum. His difficulties were further increased by the whiteness of the walls left undecorated and of the ceiling, but hopes are entertained that this may be moderated while attending the final covering of the walls with the paintings. The general harmony of a picture, as a 253 Copyright 1908 by Frank Wilbert Stokes. whole, may be fairly judged by its first effect on an intelligent eye, or by turning it upside down as Turner was content to have one of his remain when so placed by a blundering hanging committee. From the central entrance of the hall the visitor perceives immediately in front of him on the opposite wall, beyond the multitudinous exhibits in cases and otherwise, a great burst of luminous color, a sunrise, in the centre of a long Arctic landscape, and then two great visionary figures drifting through this sunrise. This is the painter's Esquimo mythology, to which the scientific mind was at first inclined to demur as too much of an innovation, but to which it speedily became reconciled. As the province of a museum is to instruct, the usual objection to a picture which requires an explanation falls to the ground, and the printed circular provided by the authorities is very acceptable. From it we learn a new scheme of heaven and earth, or, at least, new to most of us. It seems that the benighted hyperboreans accept the personification of the sun as female and of the moon as male, in what is known as the Sedna myth, or cycle, by ethnologists, Sedna being one of the names of a goddess or nymph personifying the sun. She is also, in this myth, a young girl wooed and won by a fulmar gull who takes her to his igloo, or hut, to live. Mr. Stokes has presented the particular form of this myth most familiar to him, that of the Esquimos from Alaska to Labrador and Baffin Land, he having been a member of the Peary Relief Expedition in 1892, and of the Peary North Greenland Expedition, 1893-94, as well as of Dr. Otto Nordenskjöld's Antarctic Expedition, 1901-02. In this version, the moon is forever in love with his sister, the sun, and chases her through the heavens, each carrying a lamp, she attended by light, summer and plenty, and he, by the long Arctic night. As Mr. Stokes has represented her, she is in the Esquimo summer costume, uncovered to the waist, and followed by a great flight of birds, two fulmar gulls flying before her; below, the little Arctic puffins range themselves in military ranks on the ice-floe, and two harbor seals lift their heads and cry to her, the "Mother of the Seals." She is a part of the cumulus, or summer-cloud which may be seen around her head, while her pursuer is the advance of the great night-cloud sweeping backward from his head. He is in full winter costume of furs and attended by his dogs and sledge; the lamps or torches of both are parhelia or sun dogs, which appear generally at sunrise and sunset, and beyond them are the reds and gold of the midnight sun, just seen on the sea horizon. His name is Ahn-ing-ah-neh, and hers, Suk-ehnuk; when he finally overtakes her and clasps her in his embrace it is the end of the world. This great central group appears in the centre of the north wall, over and on each side of a |