time as model. It was already strapped in place and "pawing and kicking" for freedom.

Saint-Gaudens was not, above all things, either self-controlled or patient. Once when the work had been stopped "for the thirty-fifth time, while some one looked for a lost hammer," he ordered

"Time and distance" were two of the articles in his artist-creed.

"You delay just as your father did before you," flashed Governor Morgan. Saint-Gaudens did delay, and for this he was much criticized; but think of the discouragements that met his

a gross of hammers, in the hope that, out of a hundred and forty-four, one would be at hand for use. He said to his assistants one day:

"I am going to invent a machine to make you all good sculptors. It will have hooks for the back of your necks, and strong springs. . Every thirty seconds, it will jerk you fifty feet away from your work, and hold you there for five minutes' contemplation."

art, and remember, too, his love of perfection. Often careless molders, by neglecting some detail, would waste both time and money. When a workman broke two fingers off his "Venus of the Capitol," he had to make the whole figure again. When the Morgan monument was "within three weeks of completion," the shed which sheltered it burned down, and the statue was so badly chipped that it was ruined. SaintGaudens had gone into debt for this statue, and it was not insured; but the destruction of his brain- and handlabor was worse than the money loss. He had a hard time over one hind leg of the Sherman horse. While he was in Paris, something happened to the cast, and he had to send a man to the United States to get a duplicate. "Three weeks later the man returned-with the wrong hind leg." Then, when the horse was enlarged, "the leg constantly sagged." Guided by their own judgments, the assistants "plugged up the cracks," with the result that the leg was three inches too long at the final measure

ment.

Among other stories in the charming "Reminiscences" by father and son is a confession by the son. When he was a boy in Cornish, he had a pet goat which he had trained to play a butting game. The goat would butt, Homer would dodge, and then, to his great glee, the goat would butt the wrong thing or the air. One day at dinnertime, when the studio barn was deserted, Homer was playing this game. Beyond the open barn door stood the wax model of the Logan horse, "waiting to be cast in plaster." This time, when

Homer dodged, the goat butted the back of the horse. But since it did not fall or break, the relieved child thought it was n't hurt, and did n't tell. Before any one noticed that "the rear of the animal was strangely askew," the horse had been cast in plaster and the enlargement begun. This meant the loss of a whole summer's workjust one more of the accidents and errors that increased the "toughness of the sculptor's life." The worst of all was that great catastrophethe burning of the studio in Cornish.

But, instead of dwelling on that, let us look at that other cause of delay in Saint-Gaudens's work-his love of perfection. For fourteen years, while other statues came and went, the Shaw Memorial stood in the crowded studio. A "kink in Shaw's trousers" had caught a “kink” in SaintGaudens's brain, Shaw's "right sleeve bothered him," and the flying figure drove him "nearly frantic." Again and again he modeled and remodeled her; he experimented with the folds of the drapery; he changed the branch in her right hand from palm to olive, to make her, as he said, less like a Christian martyr. In turn on the scaffold behind the Shaw, stood the Chicago Lincoln, the Puritan, the Rock Creek Cemetery figure, and Peter Cooper. Meanwhile, as Homer SaintGaudens says, his father returned to work on Shaw, "winter and summer, with unflagging persistence. Even the hottest of August days would find him high up on a ladder under the baking skylight."

Besides this, Homer Saint-Gaudens tells us that four times his father made a new beginning for the Fish monument, before arriving at a final form, and that for the McCosh relief he made "thirty-six two-foot sketches." He had to remodel by hand the enlargements of the standing Lincoln, Peter Cooper, and the Logan horse. Usually assistants do this mechanically. The inscription for the Stevenson Memorial, containing 1052 letters, was "modeled-not stamped-" letter by letter twelve times. For a coin design Saint-Gaudens modeled seventy eagles, and sometimes he would stand twenty-five of them in a row for visitors at the studio to compare. And for the Phillips Brooks monument he made over twenty sketches and drew thirty angels, before he decided to use the figure of Christ instead of an angel.

"There were few objects in his later years that my father 'caressed' as long as he did this figure," writes Homer Saint-Gaudens of the Brooks. "He selected and cast aside. He shifted folds of the gown back and forth. He juggled with the wrinkles of the trousers. . . He moved the fingers and the tilt of the right hand into a variety of

gestures. . . . He raised and lowered the chin. ... He shifted the left hand, first from the chest to a position where it held an open Bible, and last to the lectern, although the lectern was not the point from which Brooks spoke." And so the Brooks statue was long delayed.

Whether Saint-Gaudens's delays were due to accident or the search for perfection, he was, as Kenyon Cox said, "one of those artists for whom it is worth while to wait." One committee, at least, trusted him-that for the Shaw Memorial. It took Thomas Gray eight years to write his perfect elegy. Why not give Saint-Gaudens fourteen years for his wonderful bas-relief?

In our search for the secret of his magic, for the life-giving power of his touch, we find it lay where most magic does lie, in hard work. If Christopher Columbus could come to earth, and, standing outside a big, darkened building, should see it suddenly blaze with light, the touch of the electric button would seem to him a magic touch. But back of that touch would lie a complex system of wires and years of work of many minds. Back of the living, speaking bronze of SaintGaudens lay years of struggle for perfection. If his Rock Creek figure fills us with the sense of mystery, and the Shaw Memorial stirs with throbbing heroism; and if the living Lincoln looks down, nobly patient under a mighty burden, it is all because the magic touch was given through numberless experiments by the hand, and out of the brain and heart of a devoted man. Once given, the touch would last; he knew that, "A poor picture goes into the garret, books are forgotten, but the bronze remains." Saint-Gaudens's art would not die with him, like the art of Edwin Booth. It would be perpetual. And it was worth the cost, in money and vital strength. if bronze and stone could be made to live.

So much for the world's gain by the magic touch. The artist had a gain, himself. The joy of his touch came back in many ways, though, when his statues were unveiled, he tried to escape speech-making; and though, when he was asked if his life had satisfied him, he exclaimed, in genuine modesty, "No, look at those awful bronzes all over the country!" When he was traveling in the West, the sleeping-car conductor, after painfully spelling out his name, gave “a squeeze with his big fist," and said: "Why, you're the man who made that great statue in New York! Well, I declare!" That little surprise brought real joy to the sculptor. And another: one night, almost at midnight, Saint-Gaudens, his wife, and Mr. William W. Ellsworth came suddenly on an old man standing bareheaded before the Farragut monument.

"Oh, you go about your business! Have n't I a right to be here?" answered the old man. So the others walked on and left him to his moonlight and his pride.

And then Saint-Gaudens had fun in his work. Apparently the darkies, who posed for Shaw's followers, brought Saint-Gaudens the greatest merriment. He employed "countless negroes of all types," and again and again they "gave him the slip." But as time went on, he learned just to offer "a job," and finally, "promised a colored man twenty-five cents for every negro he would bring me that I could use. The following day the place was packed with them."

And so his statues brought him laughter. It was a good gift-with the magic touch. But not the best: the study he put on Brooks and the Guiding Figure gave his heart the touch divine. During most of Saint-Gaudens's life, "only the joy of religion had drawn from him any response. But now as," in making this statue, "he gave the subject more and more thought, Christ became the Man of men, a teacher of peace and happiness."

The deepest gifts are often the most secret. Those who saw Saint-Gaudens at work, and singing lustily the while, would have guessed nothing of this. Like Stevenson, he made light of pain, this singing laborer. And yet, rheumatism, nervousness, and dyspepsia were his steady companions. Three times he had to go to a hospital, and during those last seven years in Cornish, he fought a constant fight against illness. He had to "work with teeth set." "He limped around behind a curtain to take medicine . . . came back and worked away for hours." The last thing he touched, as an artist, was a medallion of his wife; he worked on that "when he could no longer stand."

In the little town of Cornish, brook-threaded and hill-caressed, Saint-Gaudens had found a satisfying home for the last years of his life. It "smiled." For Lincoln models there were "plenty of Lincoln-shaped men." The farmers loved to see the statue in the field. And a crowd of SaintGaudens's friends followed him: he had a farm; they would have farms; and they would all love the country together. So around him grew up a little settlement of artists and writers, with gardens made to live in, pillar-like poplars, and fragrant tangles of wild grape-vines. Unknowingly, the city-bred boy of long ago had craved the blossoming country, and hungered for something sweeter than the streets. The little trips to the Jersey fields, the peace of Staten Island, the over-powering grandeur of Switzerland, and the

and fields of flowers,"-all these had made that hunger worse. Saint-Gaudens, crying out for beauty, was weary of "work between four Then, too, as long as he was able, Cornish gave

walls."

him a place to play: to ride horseback (and perhaps be thrown), to fish for trout, play golf in summer and hockey in winter, to slide down "perilous toboggan-shoots," and tip out of sleighs, and to love it all-the fringing spring with its trebled brooks, and the sparkling winter with its merry bells.

As long as his strength would let him, he played and worked intensely, bearing his long, unmentioned sickness with the bravest spirit. Though he loved the world, he was not afraid to leave it, and he had not counted the "mortal years it took to mold immortal forms."

CHAPTER I

THE FAIRY BOOK.

FOUR flights up the rickety tenement staircase was a little room with the door shut tight. The key was turned in the keyhole outside. From inside came the sound of sobbing for any one to hear. But there was no one to hear; every one was too busy indoors or out on this beautiful June day. Every one who had work to do was doing it, over the hot stove, or at the shop or factory. The free children were romping or tumbling about in the alley; for this was Saturday morning, and there was no school.

Saturday morning in June! That suggests all sorts of pleasant things: parks, and flowers, and excursions on the water; birds, and green grass, and freedom to run and play out of doors. Freedom! But the key was turned in the lock outside the dingy tenement room, and there came the sound of sobbing from inside.

It was Maggie who cried. She lay on a cot-bed in the corner, crumpled up like a rosebud that has been left too long without water. The little girl's long, black curls were tangled, and her dress was torn and rumpled. Over one eye was an ugly bruise, and one of her wrists was black and blue. The room was bare and grimy. The only furniture beside the cot on which Maggie lay consisted of two broken chairs, a table, a cupboard, and a tumble-down stove. In the window, two pots of geraniums seemed struggling to look as cheerful as possible. But it was hard work; for though no merry sunshine came in at the window, the room was hot, very hot. And all the feeble efforts of the gera

niums could not sweeten the air that came up from the alley.

Presently, Maggie sat up on the bed and looked around her with red eyes. "I want to get out!" she said aloud. Maggie had a habit of talking

aloud to herself. And she talked in language not quite like that of other tenement children; for once she had had a mother who taught her better, and she had not quite forgotten. "I can't bear this place, it's so hot. It 's Saturday, and I want