The Recovery

To the visiting stranger Hillbridge's first question was, "Have you seen
Keniston's things?" Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House,
the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck
and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had
known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to
open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.

Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid
the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman
and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic
character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to "know"
Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its
effect on "atmosphere," on _milieu_. Hillbridge was Keniston's milieu,
and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert
that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without
recognizing it. "It simply didn't want to be seen in such surroundings; it
was hiding itself under an incognito," she declared.

It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the
artist's best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered
him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor
Driffert, who had a reputation for "collecting," had one day hung a sketch
on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert's visitors (always
a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one
might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an
etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently
subjected to the Professor's off-hand inquiry, "By-the-way, have you seen
my Keniston?" The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical
distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to
keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopædia. The
name was not in the Encyclopædia; but, as a compensating fact, it became
known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an
artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some
one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next
year, on the occasion of the President's golden jubilee, the Faculty, by
unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there
was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York
and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly
attempted to buy Professor Driffert's sketch, which the art journals cited
as a rare