SPEAKING OF ANGELS
The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit, formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed! How absurd a name for the oldest Rivers boy, seeking work in studios! In vain he had politely explained to us that his late father, a bookish Montreal goldsmith, had so greatly admired the senior Paul Revere of colonial history (the Paul Revere whose Huguenot name had originally been Apollos Rivoire) that he himself, British subject though he was, had bestowed the name Apollos on his own firstborn. Later Rivers arrivals, less magnificent in physique, had to content themselves with names less proud—Tom, Chuck, Nipper, and plain Ellen.
Perhaps we would have accepted that explanation, if somebody (that eternally busy somebody) had not seen young Apollos at an Academy reception, his ears tinted rose-pink, with cheeks to match, and his vigorous young eyelashes weighted with whatever it is the chorus ladies use to veil and enhance their already too potent come-hither-of-the-eye. After this, do you wonder that we jumped at the conclusion that Apollos was merely a name the youth had wished on himself, anom de pose, as it were? And why did he polish his nails? Unnatural in a boy of eighteen! Anyhow, we wouldn’t have done it, at that age. And I fear that with some of us, even his honest Canadian accent was against him. Take the wordbeen, for instance. Those whose grandfathers had always saidben, and whose mothers had saidbin, were repelled when the Montreal lad called itbean.
But the posing of Apollos (one can’t forget that!) was absolutely the best I had ever met anywhere. He first came to me when I was doing that big California thing; you know, the one they call Three Angels, two of the angels being winged marble youths in flat relief, kneeling, and the third a retributive sort of shrouded female figurein bronze, standing, of course, and dominating the other two. Get me? Oh, yes, in the round, she was. I had no trouble in finding her type, no trouble at all. Powerful women abound, these days. But the youths were a more difficult matter. Of course I didn’t want them to look Athenian, as if I’d just dislodged them from the Parthenon frieze, and given them a pair of wings apiece; but then, on the other hand, I didn’t care to have them suggest that I’d merely picked them up on the beach at Coney Island, the Sunday before. Angels mustn’t bear too personal a stamp, you know. To my thinking, no artist has ever surpassed Saint-Gaudens in creating the impersonal, other-worldly type. But he always used a lot of wonder-drapery for his angelic hosts; I had merely wings.
I had tried a good many youths from thirteen to thirty, before I finally decided to take with me to my summer studio, for a period of ten weeks, Apollos Rivers and Phineas Stickney. Remembering those tinted ears, I had some doubt about Apollos and his staying powers through a country summer, far from all but the most elementary sort of movies and like attractions; but I had a hope that the influence of Phineas Stickney,coupled with my own persuasions, would keep the boy on the side of the angels.
In fact, the angels were all that counted with me, that summer. The commission was an important one, and the contract ironclad. If within three years I couldn’t produce the Three Angels, “complete in place and in the final materials as hereinbefore specified,” my name, on the Golden Coast, would be mud instead of Jefferson. And the three years had by now dwindled to one year only! Time pressed. I’d been diligent and fore-handed enough, Heaven knows. If anything, I am diligent to a fault. The retributive woman was all done in bronze; but those two youths weren’t yet ready for the plaster, let alone the “final materials as hereinbefore specified.”
My work in the country studio was cut out for me. I had had an assistant there for some weeks, setting up the full-size work from a half-size study; but when I saw the thing sketched out in the large, I was not at all satisfied with my original idea of those figures. I wanted to make certain very drastic changes; I really needed both Apollos and Phineas, using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if theysaw a mere artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells only the good, in sculpture. If it were not for the healing touch of twilight on our work, how many of us sculptors would have abandoned the art, long ago! Well, I’ve often marvelled at the amount of work I put through that summer. Of course it makes a difference when a man’s work is such that he can make a lark out of it, as well as a living. Still, don’t run away with the idea that any art is pure ecstasy every minute. Nothing is.
I don’t know why I felt so uneasy about Apollos. All sorts of sinister anxieties haunted me. Did I fear that he would burn up my barn of a studio? No, for he smoked neither cigarettes nor a pipe. Would he elope with the cook, leaving us with an empty larder and a desecrated hearth? No, for if his own words were to be trusted, skirts bored him. Would he paint his ears, and so make talk for the village folk? How could I tell? My chief hope was in the influence ofPhineas. The two would naturally be thrown together at the farmhouse where they boarded. Phineas, as I had seen him in the city, was an unusually attractive lad. His posing, to be sure, left something to be desired. But then, very few models in this world, I knew, had both the figure and the posing power that Apollos possessed. A rare combination!
Phineas was a boy with no end of ancestry. His father had been a Mayor, filling out some one’s term, in a great New England city; his grandfather had been Governor of a near Western State; and to crown all, his grandfather’s great-grandfather had been a Signer. I wondered how he could stoop to pose, after all that! But for some reason, he wanted to study modelling, and so had begged me to take him on as assistant. When I declined the honor, he offered to pose; anything to forward his artistic studies. I engaged him, and naturally thinking that so august a personage deserved more consideration than Apollos, I allotted to the aristocrat the easier, briefer afternoon sessions, and took Apollos with the morning dews.
We had a routine. From five till quarter past, Apollos and I disposed of three buttered healthbiscuits and two hot doughnuts apiece, the whole made interesting by the very good coffee which I myself made over an oil stove; in the deep country, wise housekeepers ask no crack-of-dawn exploits from any cook, no matter how greatly underworked. The doughnuts down, we worked easily and steadily until my normal family breakfast, at which I sat down with appetite. No loafing, however! At eight, Apollos and I were in the studio again, working till noon. Thus Apollos posed six hours, and Phineas four.
From the first, I tried to work in a little fatherly counsel for Apollos during the pose. “That knee just a bit to the left, please, and the rear hoof as far back as you can get it. Fine! Well, you know you’re in luck, up here in the country air, along with a lad like Phineas! Not that he poses any better than you; no one does. But his manners are certainly good, aren’t they?”
“Are they, sir?”
I asked myself whether Apollos was perhaps jealous of his more fortunate co-worker. His face, however, showed only a perfect Apollonian calm, combined with a gratifying attention to business. It was a kneeling pose, you remember; and those who have never knelt much can’t knowwhat grit it takes, when long drawn out. I thought it wiser to defer advice to a more convenient season. Next morning, when I was working on a comparatively easy place, I happened to say to Apollos that Phineas talked remarkably well for a boy of his age. Apollos preserved his pose and made no reply. I pressed the subject.
“Perfectly good talker, sir, just as you say,” replied Apollos, squirming ever so slightly with the foot I was not modelling, “but of course you hire us to pose, not talk. I rather fancied you liked the place kept quiet.”
“Righto, boy. But sometimes a little conversation helps the slow minutes to skip by.”
“That depends, sir.”
“On what?”
“Oh, on who does the talking, and what is said.”
The reply caught my fancy. I wondered what response Phineas, that excellent conversationalist, would have made; I decided to put the same question to him, in the afternoon. Unfortunately, his posing happened to be less satisfactory than usual that day, and it thrust me out of the mood for easy converse with him. Besides, he himself had so much to say of his ambitions, prospects,and great-grandfathers, that I did not care to add anything to the welter of talk. A few days later, however, I found occasion to remind him that with his inheritance—I meant blue blood, of course—he was fortunate in being able to help those boys with whom he came in contact.
“I’ve tried to help Apollos with his manners,” he replied, “but, confidentially, it’s rather uphill work.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Apollos doesn’t appear so badly. Seldom speaks unless spoken to, and then pretty sensibly, I find. Besides” (here I thought a helpful suggestion might be in order), “his posing is so absolutely perfect that anything else he does perhaps seems imperfect in comparison.”
“Yes, poor fellow! Pity that just posing should be what a fellow’s fitted for, isn’t it? For my part—”
“For your part,” I interrupted rather testily, “if you will kindly keep that left leg of yours—well, ever so slightlyreminiscentof what it was when you began to pose it for me, I shall be most appreciative.” I had never before spoken like that to the scion of a Signer, but I saw he needed it. It was gradually being revealed to me that long descent is by no means the main desideratumin a model. Phineas had developed a rather unusual and uncanny gift for slumping in his pose;—making it easier and easier for himself, minute by minute, so that at the end of the half-hour, there was really nothing left that was of the slightest use to me. I had to do my work from knowledge, instead of from Phineas. Of course, most models have this infirmity of self-protection, but Phineas could give all comers cards and spades in the game of slumping.
Still, in the excellent séances I had with Apollos, I would sometimes enlarge upon Phineas’s advantages. Once I expressed a hope that Apollos was profiting duly by the companionship.
“It profiteth me nothing,” was the unexpected reply. “Phineas talked me over once. Never again, sir!”
“How so?”
“Oh, nothing of any importance, really. A silly fool business. I couldn’t make any one, an adult, I mean, understand just how it happened.”
“Try me! Boy myself once.”
A slow color shot up over Apollos’s classic torso, and flamed fiercely in his ears. He even became white around the mouth, as if the blood had receded from that part to concentrate in hislistening apparatus. Then his confidence gushed forth, as if long pent up.
“I wanted some money to get my little sister a birthday present. She’d been ill in bed for five weeks, and was peevish as a wasp, driving Aunt Lise distracted asking for a big doll. Much as ever we could pay for the doctor and medicines, let alone a French doll, but I wanted to get it for her. She’s the only girl we have. Well, I was walking by Flatto’s one day, with Phineas, and I was fool enough to say I’d give my boots if I could get her a beauty doll we saw there in the window. ‘Gosh,’ says Phin, ‘I can tell you how you can earn that doll, on the side, without working.’ ‘How so?’ says I. ‘Well,’ says Phinny, ever so thoughtful, ‘a rich feller and I got talking about the way girls paint up their faces, and I said men sometimes did it too. He said rats, and I bet him ten I could prove it, and he took me up on it. I was thinking about the Academy exhibition,’ says Phinny, ‘and I knew Mr. Lucas was sending his self-portrait to the show. But now,’ says Phinny, ‘I’ve found out that portrait wasn’t accepted; and maybe my friend wouldn’t ante, just for a paintedportrait, not a realperson. But,’ says Phinny, very earnestly, ‘if I could get a regularfeller, like you, to make up with paint, I’d give him half what I make; and that would net you the five plunks for the doll.’”
Apollos paused as if ashamed of “telling.” But his recollections were too much for him, and upon my encouragement, he went on.
“Well, I fell for it. I didn’t stop to think how it would look; I only knew the money would look good to me. And I knew Phinny was a little brother to the rich; some of his fool-friends just wallow in coin. So on the spur of the moment, we went round to Phin’s house for him to do me. He’s in with the set that do private theatricals, and he has all the stuff from a rabbit’s-foot down.Ithought it would be funny if he would do my nose good and red; but, no, he just did my cheeks and ears, and blackened up my eyelashes, and we went right over to the Academy exhibition then and there, and met his fool-friend. One of the artists had given Phinny tickets on account of his ancestors. I had no idea what I looked like. People stared, of course, but I thought that was part of the programme.”
Evidently a very painful thought still lurked in Apollos’s mind.
“You got the money,” I remarked, casually.
“Oh, no.” Apollos rapidly wiggled all his ten toes. “I threw it back at him and told him to go to Hell with it.”
“For Heaven’s sake, why?”
Again a bright red suffused the boy’s face.
“When I got up to the L station and looked in the mirror, I saw for the first time that he’d made me up to look like agirl!” Clearly the horror of that realization had not yet departed from Apollos. “It was a low-down trick, and I beat him up for it.”
With a new respect for the kneeling boy, I watched the blush die away from his countenance; it lingered last of all in his ears. How often I myself had repeated that stupid tattle about Apollos and his ears at the Academy! I dare say I may have turned red myself, when I recognized how small the talk was, and what a small thing had started it. Perhaps Apollos observed this, for he continued, “You know what it is to have a habit of blushing, don’t you? The more you try not to, the more it happens. Well, Phineas noticed it on me, my Canadian ears, you know, that first day we met in your New York studio. So he thought he could put one over on me. And I’ll say he did.”
“So I suppose you two down there at the boarding-house never speak as you pass pie?”
“Sure we do! What’s the use of holding a grudge? We’ve got on fine since we fought.” A big generous smile swept the shadows from his eyes. “And the best of it was, Ellie got her doll, after all. Who from? From Phinny, to be sure. Said he couldn’t feel right about it, any other way, so I let him.” Having been a boy myself, I saw the point; and I marvelled once more at the intricacies of boy nature.
At that moment, I was modelling a hand, one of the important details, as it happened. Apollos had superb hands, strong and sinewy, with those noble bones we sculptors are always looking for. To my surprise, I found that I was actually copying the youth’s hand, every bit of it. And that’s something one can’t often do; one generally has to juggle with Nature, in the interest of Art. It’s part of the game, especially if you are doing angels.
“Say, ’Pollos, what’s the idea, manicuring your nails? Thank Heaven you do, as far as I’m concerned; all I have to do is to copy that left hand of yours.”
Not a trace of embarrassment appeared in thelad’s reply. “I’m very pleased if it’s right, sir. You see, I studied it all out, from the hands on Michael Angelo’s David. I saw that most of you sculptors use that type of hand, nails all trued up, and so on; and I concluded I’d better dress the part, as long as I was on the job.”
So then, the manicuring was but a part of the amazing Apollonian thoroughness!—the same thoroughness that I had remarked in him when he went out one afternoon with an old gun of mine, and brought me back three pairs of wings—a sapsucker’s, a crow’s, and a goose’s. The goose’s wings, in particular, he told me in his serious, smiling way, might perhaps give me some suggestion for the other angel, “the Phineas feller.” He was right, too. In making an angel’s wing, one does notcopya goose’s, but one gets light from on high.
“I suppose you mean to go on with this work, don’t you? Posing, studio jobs, and so on?”
Apollos opened wide eyes. “Not I, sir! For me, it’s only apis-aller, if you’ll excuse my saying so.Faute de mieux, you know.”
I was astonished, for I had no idea that Apollos knew a word of French, even the tags he had just used. I thought I would be jocose.
“What are you going to do, then? Teach languages?”
“I’ve tried that,” replied the best model I ever saw, “but I found it unsatisfactory. You see my mother was French, born in Strasbourg. So while she lived, we always spoke the three languages at home, meal-times; English for breakfast, German for dinner, and French for supper. Father liked it so, and we boys couldn’t look back on a time when it wasn’t so. I had the French conversation classes for two terms at the Elmdale High School, and I got on fine until one of the trustees wanted the job for his wife’s sister. So he went ahead and found out that I was a minor, and had me fired.”
“What a shame!”
“Why, no, it didn’t matter much. If I might rest this elbow just a moment, it seems a bit dead—I meant to quit, anyway. There was nothing in it for me, it wasn’t leading to anything I wanted.”
“Well, what was it you wanted?”
Apollos made no answer other than that slow blush of his, swarming all over his face and finally demobilizing in his ears. For a moment, his whole figure had an expression that would havebeen wistful in a smaller lad; even as it was, there was something very touching about it. I could only hope that his ambition, however humble, was at least honorable. I reminded myself that I must not expect, in a Canadian boy, the same lofty impulses that would quicken the blood of a Signer’s descendant.
Meanwhile, my work with Phineas was going rather badly. I could not teach his aristocratic spirit to get down to brass tacks. His posing became worse instead of better. Before long, I found myself doing over again, every morning, from Apollos, all that I had bungled in doing, every afternoon, from Phineas. It occurred to me that perhaps I was too tired, in the afternoon, to do justice to Phineas, and that possibly Phineas’s pose was the more difficult one. However, when I changed about, things were still worse. I realized at last that my sprig of nobility was a hindrance rather than a help. What to do? I had promised him work through the summer. If I should pay him handsomely and discharge him, with his part of the bargain unfulfilled, I should write myself down an easy mark for models—a reputation no serious artist seeks. It would be complicity after the crime. Besides, Apollos mightwell become discontented, on beholding the rewards of the ungodly.
Toward the middle of the summer, the tension became too great. Precious as time was, with that ironclad contract haunting my dreams, I saw that perhaps I should gain, in the end, if I should leave my studio, for a double-size week-end, and go a-fishing from Friday to the following Tuesday. I was working in plastiline instead of clay, and I could safely leave my angels, without fear of their drying up on me as soon as my back was turned. The holiday might not hurt the boys, either. Apollos had stuck valiantly to his “pis-aller” job; perhaps Phineas would do better after a few days’ change; at any rate, I told myself, he couldn’t do worse. In that, however, I was mistaken.
By Thursday midnight, my motor had already borne me north two hundred miles from my studio and all its works. Some men sit by a brookside to think, but I go fishing to forget. I wanted an oblivious antidote against art and angels in art. But my respite was brief. Sunday night, on returning to the mountain inn at thehead of the lake, carrying with me a gorgeous string of trout that I knew would win me the plaudits of all guests at Monday’s breakfast, I was confronted with a telegram.
Studio destroyed. Come as soon as you can.Phineas Stickney
Studio destroyed. Come as soon as you can.
Phineas Stickney
For a second, I had an hallucination; I saw also the words, “Angels in ashes. Contract ironclad.” But I waved that aside; and, I hardly know why, my utter dismay was soon followed by a sort of exhilaration, the exhilaration a fellow feels when he suddenly has to make a fresh start, and knows he has strength for it. No Sunday trains served those remote God-fearing parts; I must return as I came. A few years before, my hill and home had been struck by lightning, but no damage had been done, except to a drinking-glass and the cook’s Thursday afternoon corsets. Turning my motor’s nose homeward, I wondered whether the lightning had returned to finish a work thus timidly begun. More likely fire, though! Did Apollos smoke, after all? Or Phineas? My curiosity was almost equal to my consternation.
All night long, my runabout raced up hill and down dale, sometimes beside a moonlit brook, sometimes through clean, sweet forests, andagain along dusty country roads with straggling farmhouses fast asleep, not even giving a dream tomytroubles! Grateful guests at the inn had pressed upon me loaves in exchange for my fishes, and by way of a solitary breakfast among the morning mists, I disposed of an incredible number of sandwiches as well as all the hot coffee in my own miracle-bottle. I propitiated my engine for the last lap.
The day had not lost its freshness when I reached the foot of my hill, and strained my eyes for a glimpse of the disaster. To my surprise, the big barn studio, as far as I could judge from the road, was still intact. But it was in the back part that my angels were! And when I had at last finished rounding that interminable uphill bend over the roots of the elm trees, I saw that there was no longer any back part. There was only a pile of charred timbers.
At a little distance stood a metal garage, one of those ugly, useful structures that invite scoffing from all persons of taste. It was untouched by the fire. The door was open. I could see Phineas just within. Beyond Phineas, stretched out flat on those trestles I had been grumbling about for years because the carpenters never took themaway, were my angels, uncovered, and looking, to the casual eye, as good as new. I was glad, then, that I knew how to thank God. And before long, I was glad, according to the custom of my tribe, to get a new light on my angels. Sculptors are like that. They would go through fire and water to get a new light, it seems.
“Your work?” I asked the question of Phineas, and pleasantly enough.
The boy’s eyes filled. “Yes, sir.”
“Where’s Apollos?”
“In bed, burned arm, broken leg—Oh, dear, oh, dear!” With this childlike exclamation, the son of a hundred Stickneys broke down utterly.
Between sobs, Phineas made his foolish city boy’s confession. He had merely made a fire to roast some corn in the ear, and meaning to be extremely careful, had kindled his sticks close up against an old stone wall a few feet away from the studio with the angels. Yes, he had spoken about it to Apollos the day before, and Apollos had warned him. But, such is the stubbornness of the sons of the Revolution, he had felt perfectly sure it would be safe. His distress was so evident that I refrained, at that time, from pointing out what a consummate jackass he was.
“Before I knew it,” he went on, “the wind veered clean around, and the fire burst through the wall quicker’n chain lightning, and began climbing the dry grass on the bank up toward the studio. And all those last year’s leaves! You would never believe it!”
“Oh, yes, I would,” I retorted, a little bitterly. “I am still in my right mind.”
“Apollos was in the garage, tinkering on a bust he brought in there when you went away, and I was planning to surprise him with the roast corn. So I hollered to Apollos, and Apollos hollered to Henry, and Henry telephoned to the town-hall to ring the bell like blazes. And in ten minutes half the men in the village were here with brooms and shovels.”
“But who got out the angels? Or did they soar out, under their own steam?”
“Well,” said Phineas, “they never could have come through if it hadn’t been for Apollos! ‘Those angels have justgotto be saved, if any of us are,’ says Apollos. So he grabbed up a saw and a screw-driver, and what the saw couldn’t do, the screw-driver could. He worked like lightning, Apollos did. ‘Easy, boys, easy,’ he kept saying, calm as if he was down at the boarding-house,eating griddle cakes. ‘It’ll be quite a disappointment for the boss, anyhow, the best we can do,’ says Apollos. So while the rest of the fellers were fighting the fire outside with brooms and spades and inside with whatever water they could get, and, gosh, it wasn’t much, Apollos got Prince Eugene Gage, the town drunkard, you know, and One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and that hulkingest one of the two big Beecher boys, and the three of them, along with him and me, we got those angels out somehow, safe enough, and not much jarred, really, sir. And we carried them into the garage here, and stuck ’em on the horses, as you see.”
“Good work, my lad, but how about Apollos?”
“Well, you know how thorough Apollos is. He suddenly remembered that the half-size study was in back there, right in the midst of the fire; and he’d heard you say you wanted to keep it and send it down to New York. We couldn’t stop him. He got away from us, went in there, slid the thing quick down onto the little green truck, and pushed it out over the sill just in time. Only not quite in time. That’s how he got his broken leg. And his shirt had just begun burning on him when he fell over himself. The doctor says thearm will be all right inside a week, but the leg’s a longer job.”
I had rather lost interest in Phineas, before I went away, but now I found myself changing. I was glad to see that boy’s complete loyalty to Apollos; recognition of valor had apparently left no room for the customary Stickney complacency. I had noted, too, that the aristocratic Stickney countenance was somewhat disfigured by a red wound across the upper lip, but I forbore to ask the boy if he got it eating roast corn. Within the garage, I took careful account of my angels. Their celestial composure was scarcely shaken, it would seem. If only I could get them upright again, as successfully as Apollos and his band of ne’er-do-weels had laid them flat, all would yet be well, and the name of Jefferson unmuddied.
By the end-window of the garage, in what chanced to be a good north light, I saw a bust; the bust that Apollos, of all persons in the world, had been modelling from memory in the dark privacy of his farmhouse attic room, and immediately on my departure, had brought to the garage for an orgy of peaceful study. Even from the distance at which I stood, I perceived that the thing was a startlingly good likeness of myself;myself in a somewhat heroic aspect, to be sure, but still unmistakably me, almost life-size, in clay. My me-ness stuck out all over it. It really gave me a start, offered me an ideal to live up to. I don’t say it was finer than anything of Houdon’s or Rodin’s. I merely say it was amazing for a boy who had had no instruction save the crumbs he had picked up while posing. The lad’s secret ambition was quite evident to me now. But for my own rather heartless absorption in my Three Angels, I might have guessed it before. I felt ashamed.
“Phineas,” I remarked very seriously, and I suited the action to the word, “I take off my hat to Apollos!”
Phineas answered, with a sincerity not to be doubted in a Stickney, “So do I, and I always shall. That is, if he keeps on like this!”
The fire gave me a new light on my models. I learned to my surprise that my aristocrat was something of a carpenter. He was full of plans for rebuilding the destroyed wing of my studio, and even drew everything out carefully on paper in scale, and very creditably too. I saw that if I could get a few men at once, it would take but a short time to rig up a temporary refuge for finishingmy angels. Late haying being over, the thing was somehow accomplished; Phineas worked like a boy possessed; and, as Apollos was soon hobbling about very capably on crutches, we had a studio-warming, during which the two lads superintended the replacing of the angels, by the efforts of their former crew, Prince Eugene Gage, the town drunkard, One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and the hulkingest Beecher boy. Those three were the scum of the village. Hence I often say, In an emergency, don’t scorn the scum.
But the oddest part of the adventure was this. And I’ve not yet finished marvelling at it. After the two angels were really up again, and Phineas and Apollos and I stood staring at them, Apollos, with that little air of authority that nobly earned crutches sometimes confer, suddenly said out, quite loud, “But there’s nothing to do to them, really, Mr. Jefferson! They’redone!” And after one good glance, my inward eye told me that he was absolutely right. I might never have known that theyweredone, however, if I had kept on working at them, and if I had not, in despair, gone a-fishing! That very night, I telegraphed for my plaster-moulder.
Did both boys become sculptors? Oh, no, nothing so tragic as that. Apollos is the sculptor, but Phineas went into architecture; he knows more about stone walls than he did before the fire. Since the fire, the two are fast friends, and work together when they can. They are the two young fellows who lately captured the commission for that big Unknown Heroism monument the papers have been printing pictures of. I think they’ll make good, too. But you never would have guessed it would end that way, if you had seen them together at the Academy. The rosy-eared Apollos!