ad been put to
work under an Italian sculptor. He had an almost morbid desire that
I should carry on his work, under, as he often pointed out to me,
conditions so much more auspicious. He left me in the charge of his
one intimate friend, an American gentleman in the consulate at Rome,
and his instructions were that I was to be educated there and to
live there until I was twenty-one. After I was of age, I came to
Paris and studied under one master after another until I was nearly
thirty. Then, almost for the first time, I was confronted by a duty
which was not my pleasure.

"My grandfather's death, at an advanced age, left an invalid maiden
sister of my father's quite alone in the world. She had suffered for
years from a cerebral disease, a slow decay of the faculties which
rendered her almost helpless. I decided to go to America and, if
possible, bring her back to Paris, where I seemed on my way toward
what my poor father had wished for me.

"On my arrival at my father's birthplace, however, I found that this
was not to be thought of. To tear this timid, feeble, shrinking
creature, doubly aged by years and illness, from the spot where she
had been rooted for a lifetime, would have been little short of
brutality. To leave her to the care of strangers seemed equally
heartless. There was clearly nothing for me to do but to remain and
wait for that slow and painless malady to run its course. I was
there something over two years.

"My grandfather's home, his father's homestead before him, lay on
the high banks of a river in Western Pennsylvania. The little town
twelve miles down the stream, whither my great-grandfather used to
drive his ox-wagon on market days, had become, in two generations,
one of the largest manufacturing cities in the world. For hundreds
of miles about us the gentle hill slopes were honeycombed with gas
wells and coal shafts; oil derricks creaked in every valley and
meadow; the brooks were sluggish and discolored with crude
petroleum, and the air was impregnated by its searching odor. The
great glass and iron manufactories had come up and up the river
almost to our very door; their smoky exhalations brooded over us,
and their crashing was always in our ears. I was plunged into the
very incandescence of human energy. But, though my nerves tingled
with the feverish, passionate endeavor which snapped in the very air
about me, none of these great arteries seemed to feed me; this
tumultuous life did not