Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

Earlier in life he was occasionally given to practical jokes. A woman who kept a thread and needle store in Boston was supposed to have committed murder, and was tried for it but acquitted. One day, as Appleton was going by her place of business with a friend he said: “Come in here with me; I want to see how that woman looks.” Then surveying the premises, as if he wished to find something to purchase, he asked her if she had any “galluses” for sale,--gallus being a shop-boy's term at the time for suspenders.

When the Art Museum in Boston was first built its odd appearance attracted very general attention, and some one asked Tom Appleton what he thought of it. “Well,” he said, “I have heard that architecture is a kind of frozen music, and if so I should call the Art Museum frozen ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ”

Thomas G. Appleton was no dilettante; his interest in the subject was serious and abiding. He did not wear his art as he did his gloves, nor did he turn it into an intellectual abstraction. There was nothing he disliked more than the kind of pretension which tries to make a knowledge of art a vehicle for self-importance. “Who,” he said, “ought not to feel humble before a painting of Titian's or Correggio's? It is only when we feel so that we can appreciate a great work of art.” He believed that