oung and timid in Cook County.

Among the women of this group Bessie Potter, who did lovely statuettes
of girls and children, was a notable figure. Edward Kemeys, Oliver
Dennett Grover, Charles Francis Browne, and Hermon MacNeill, all young
artists of high endowment, and marked personal charm became my valued
associates and friends. We were all equally poor and equally confident
of the future. Our doubts were few and transitory as cloud shadows, our
hopes had the wings of eagles.

As Chicago possessed few clubs of any kind and had no common place of
meeting for those who cultivated the fine arts, Taft's studio became,
naturally, our center of esthetic exchange. Painting and sculpture were
not greatly encouraged anywhere in the West, but Lorado and his brave
colleagues, hardy frontiersmen of art, laughed in the face of all
discouragement.

A group of us often lunched in what Taft called "the Beanery"--a noisy,
sloppy little restaurant on Van Buren Street, where our lofty
discussions of Grecian sculpture were punctuated by the crash of
waiter-proof crockery, or smothered with the howl of slid chairs.
However, no one greatly minded these barbarities. They were all a part
of the game. If any of us felt particularly flush we dined, at sixty
cents each, in the basement of a big department store a few doors
further west; and when now and then some good "lay brother" like
Melville Stone, or Franklin Head, invited us to a "royal gorge" at
Kinsley's or to a princely luncheon in the tower room of the Union
League, we went like minstrels to the baron's ball. None of us possessed
evening suits and some of us went so far as to denounce swallowtail
coats as "undemocratic." I was one of these.

This "artistic gang" also contained several writers who kept a little
apart from the journalistic circle of which Eugene Field and Opie Read
were the leaders, and though I passed freely from one of these groups to
the other I acknowledged myself more at ease with Henry Fuller and Taft
and Browne, and a little later I united with them in organizing a
society to fill our need of a common meeting place. This association we
called _The Little Room_, a name suggested by Madelaine Yale Wynne's
story of an intermittently vanishing chamber in an old New England
homestead.

For a year or two we met in Bessie Potter's studio, and on the theory
that our club, visible and hospitable on Friday afternoon, was
non-existent during all the other days of th