Every now and again, generally when the warm weather is upon us, somebody or other starts a heated discussion about something that is of no particular interest to anybody.

This time it is Mr. Joseph Pennell, the artist, who wails and gnashes his pen about the terrible bill-board and advertising pictures that deface the public buildings and thoroughfares of American cities and the public scenery of the American countryside.

If my opinion were asked I should be tempted to quote the gentle answer with which the late William D. Howells was wont to turn away argument, and say to Mr. Pennell, “I think perhaps you are partly right.”

But since I am not on Mr. Pennell’s list of great American artists, a list, by the way that contains only two names, I am free to say what I really think, and that is that if the dear old familiar “Ads” were suddenly to disappear from the streets and cars, I should miss them very much.

Perhaps I have acquired a taste for them as the dweller near a street railroad first endures, then tolerates, and at last becomes so completely habituated to the roaring of wheels and the clang of metal that he is unable to sleep without their soothing lullaby.

Soothing—that’s what they are, these advertising pictures. They soften the underground torment of travel in the Subway, they take the place of the scenery which beguiles the tedium of ordinary travel, and at least they are, as a rule, more interesting to contemplate than the people in the opposite seat. Those people are strangers, the people in the advertisement panels are, many of them, old friends, friends met in other cars in other cities. Mr. Pennell no doubt would like to see them thrown off the train, but I am always glad to meet them again, and to some of them, with whom I have a sort of informal bowing acquaintance, I mentally take off my hat.

One amiable gentleman in particular I always look for and hail with delight when I find myself sitting opposite to him. He is an Italian, I take it, from his appearance, and from Naples, to judge by his accent, which, though I have never heard his voice, is depicted as plainly as the nose on his face.

Neither do I know his name, but I call him Signor Pizzicato, for it is quite evident that nature intended him for an Operatic career. How he ever came to be a barber, I cannot imagine. Perhaps he sang in the Barber of Seville and lost his voice and became a realist, as some painters lose their sense of form and become cubists or futurists. Whatever he should have been or might have been or was, a barber is what he is now, and I gaze upon him in fascination as with a priceless gesture of thumb and forefinger (as if he should pluck an individual mote from a sunbeam) he extols to his customer and to you, the bouquet so ravishing of the hair tonic he holds in his other hand, on the sale of which he presumably receives a large commission.

Then there is that delightful little Miss clad in airy next-to-nothings—but no, on second thought I shall not introduce you to her. I fear she is not to be trusted. The last time I sat opposite to her in a street-car in Cleveland—(or was it in Buffalo)—she caused me to go five blocks past my destination which happened to be a railway station, so that I was two blocks late for my train.

All I will tell you about her, gentle reader, is that she has fringed gentian eyes with a look in them that says quite plainly nothing would gratify her more than to play the same trick upon you.

All this chatter, I am aware, has nothing to do with Art, that is to say the “Art of Painting”; that large, severe-looking female you sometimes see crouched in an uncomfortable position on a still more uncomfortable cornice of a public building, wearing a laurel wreath and a granite peplum, and holding in her hand a huge stone palette.

But sometimes this severe female climbs down from her stone perch and takes a day off, Coney Island-wise, on the billboards and street cars, and then if she is not always at her best, she is often very amusing.

And just because a goddess isn’t stuck up it doesn’t prove that she isn’t a goddess—does it?