"Well, William, heard anything of your son?"
"No, Miss; but they'll send 'e to the front right away. 'E be just the man they be wantin' there."
"I'm sure he is. But why do you think he will go straight to the front?"
"Why, you see, Miss, 'e'll be able to show 'em the way about. 'E was at the Boer War, an' knows all them furrin' parts."
Mr. Arthur Grayson, recently returned from Bad Nauheim, brings an interview with His Excellency Herr von Bode, which he obtained under curious circumstances. It seems that the famous Director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and for long the ultimate arbiter of taste in Germany, wishing to send a message to the American people, wrote to an American journalist, also, as it chanced, named Grayson, and also a resident in the other Grayson's hotel, making an appointment. But the American Grayson had then gone, and the English Grayson having opened his letter by mistake, and being not unwilling to see Berlin for himself during war-time, carried the missive to the capital, met the illustrious virtuoso and received the confidences intended for the instruction of New York and Washington, correcting their preposterous view of the German origin of the war.
We now give Mr. Grayson's words: "'To make you understand the situation clearly,' said Herr von Bode, we must go back a little into history. Some years ago I was offered by an English dealer a wax bust of Flora, which I saw in a moment was by Leonardo da Vinci. No trained eye could have mistaken it for anything else. I therefore bought it and made it the very jewel of this superb collection. England, however, always envious and acquisitive, in matters of connoisseurship dense, and now mad with rage to think that I alone had sufficient culture to discern the true and beautiful, at once set up the cry that the bust was the work not of Leonardo in the fifteenth century, but of an Englishman named Lucas in the nineteenth. They stopped at nothing in defence of this claim. The English sculptor's son was even produced to remember his father at work on it; while it was affirmed that a piece of his father's waistcoat had been used as an internal support for the bust. The campaign of calumny and mis-information, in short, was as thorough as if Wolff's Bureau—I mean it was very thorough."
"'And what happened?' I asked.
"'We had no doubt ourselves,' said my companion. 'Had Mr. Tussaud himself sworn that he was the modeller only yesterday we should have had no doubt, so indelibly, to the competent German eye, was the genius of Leonardo stamped upon it. But we permitted the bust to be opened from the back, and true enough a piece of modern cloth was found within. That, however, as I say, could not affect the authenticity of the work, for it might easily have been sent to Lucas for renomvation, and it is well known that a renovator often stuffs something inside the shell of these busts to keep it from falling in while he is at work.'
"'Still it was, perhaps, awkward for you?' I asked.
"'In the contemptible English art circles some cry of triumph was raised,' he replied, 'but no on in Germany was shaken. Moreover, they knew—what I knew—that England raised these doubts merely to cover her own original stupidity and ignorance. She was now convinced that it was by Leonardo, because she knew I could not err, and her game was to belittle the bust. How barbaric! how devilish!
