With hushed steps, Robinson led West to the churchman's feet. "I have the honour," the American remembered he said, "to present a young American who has a letter of introduction to Your Emi­nence, and who has come to Italy for the purpose -of studying the fine arts." The Cardinal raised his blind head with a sudden gesture of interest; to him the word American connoted Indians. "Is he white or black?" the old man asked. Robinson replied truthfully that West was very fair. At this the Cardinal wrinkled his dark brow. "What, as fair as I,am?" Fortunately the satellites did not have to hide their smiles, since the swarthy churchman was blind. Soon the phrase "as fair as the Cardinal" was current all over Rome.

Stretching out his famous hands, Albani asked West to approach. Conversation ceased; all present watched the bloodless fingers pass over the American's face. When the Cardinal reported that he had an admirable head, the head of an artist, West's reputation was al­ready half made.

West, who did not know a word of Italian, must have been be­wildered by most of what went on around him, but he was attracting attention, and that was pleasant. Finally the talk rose to a higher pitch, the gesticulations became more emphatic, and Robinson told him that the entire company had decided to show him the Vatican Museum the next morning. The virtuosi were curious to see what effect the Apollo Belvedere, which they considered the greatest statue of antiquity, would have on a young man educated among Indians, a noble savage who seemed to have stepped out of the newly published pages of the early romantic writers.

The next morning thirty carriages moved in procession down the historic streets of Rome, the most magnificent carriages in the capital of Christendom, and every one was crowded with connois­seurs. In the first rode the Cardinal, with blind, inturned eyes and wrinkled mummy's face, a living symbol of the past. And beside him the blond young man from the wilderness, the muscles of youth tense under his clothes, sat flushed, excited, and a little afraid. They passed by monuments of dead emperors, by broken columns around which new grass grew. Then the Vatican rose be­fore them, and West saw for the first time the symbol that had ruled the medieval world. The carriages stopped; the old man and the young alighted, while the crowd flocked after. They walked down high hallways, gilded and tinted during the Renaissance, until they stepped into an even older world. The shards of an­tiquity lay around them now: broken figures from pediments, sarcophagi of the anonymous dead. Still the old man shuffled on and the young followed.

Finally they came to a room where the stage had been set. In the centre stood the closed case which contained the Apollo; beside it an attendant in the livery of the Popes. The Cardinal placed West before the case while the connoisseurs crowded behind them. Every eye was on the young man when at a signal from the octogenarian the doors were thrown open. There, dazzlingly white, stood the first nude statue West had ever seen. He cried: "My God, how like a Mohawk warriorl"

When this remark was translated, it excited indignation; the sav­age, instead of falling on his face before the great statue, had com­pared it to something as savage as lie. A disgruntled murmur went up from the crowd. Told the cause of their dissatisfaction, West explained to the translator what a,noble race the Mohawks were, how strong, how proud, what admirable children of nature; "I have seen them often standing in that very attitude, and pursuing with an intense eye the arrow which they have just discharged from the bow." Then the virtuosi, remembering their Rousseau, de­clared that a better criticism of a statue had never been heard. West was increasingly feted in the salons of Rome.

He was not surprised, for he was used to being a focus of admira­tion. As far back as he could remember, he had been regarded as a remarkable being; in his old age he insisted that even his birth had been miraculous, though in the Protestant manner. He told his biographer John Gait, the Scottish novelist, that divine destiny had marked him in his obscure birthplace and guided his footsteps for ever after.