you of your daughter, and it's hanging up in my studio waiting for somebody to bring it over to you-if you let me know of someone I'll send it. When it goes he will write you a note.

"I think C. E. ought to go in a Botanical showcase in the same museum with D. There now it's dark and I must stop. "Your friend,

"AUG. ST.-GAUDENS."

Always the best of good friends, SaintGaudens and I yet naturally saw less of each other during the following busy years in America than in the stirring Paris times. He and McKim and Stanford White several times came up together to my place on the Hudson, when we invariably talked over the exposition and as invariably decided that in a similar case we would do exactly as before-if given the chance!

In the spring of '92 McKim had for some time been slaving at the designs for his buildings at the World's Fair, and so when the work was well under way, collecting a number of his friends, he took us out to Chicago in a special car-SaintGaudens, Millet, Maynard, La Farge, Richard M. Hunt, George B. Post, William Laffan the editor of the Sun, and Mrs. Millet, Mrs. Laffan, and Miss Lockwood. Numerous artists had been employed on the different buildings, my share of the work consisting in designing the exterior of Machinery Hall, which I frescoed in the Renaissance style. We were wined and dined by the Chicagoans and had an excellent sight of the skeleton of the exposition, which opened in all its glory some months later.

Saint-Gaudens was always making up little suppers at intervals, and on these occasions his manner was as warm and his quiet humor as charming as ever it was the first time I met him at the old Falcone. Above all I delight in the remembrance of the bachelor dinner that a number of us gave Stanford White on the eve of his marriage. A lot of things happened before the evening ended becomingly with a Spanish dance by Hopkinson Smith and Loyall Farragut, neither of whom could be persuaded to stop until they had entangled themselves and every one else in long wreaths of smilax. Great

were the preparations for this dinner, and Saint-Gaudens got a great deal of fun out of designing the menu, on which caricatures of White were interspersed with the more important items of the evening. Here was sketched White about to launch forth into one of the after-dinner speeches that he loathed; here we saw him pulling at his eternal mustaches; and here appeared nothing but the mustaches-but we recognized the likenesses as readily as we would if in these days we saw but a double row of teeth and a pair of spectacles on the cartoon page of a New York newspaper.

The most remarkable, original, and suggestive of all Saint-Gaudens's works seems to me to be the Adams monument in Washington. When I went for the first time to look for it in the Rock Creek Cemetery I made up my mind not to have it shown to me but to find it by myself. It was an afternoon in March, a grayish, sad day. Snow spotted the ground here and there, trying to obliterate the first signs of spring. I was alone, and the only sound was a slight rustling or sighing in the pine-trees above the tomb. I sat for a long time on the curved bench facing the figure, and I will not attempt to describe the supernatural effect it had upon me. The impressiveness, the solemnity of this thing, which seemed actually alive, I can never forget.

And here is a part of a letter I got from Saint-Gaudens in 1886. Perhaps it will serve to bring to a close these disjointed recollections of my friend. It brings back even now to me the "thirst for it" that he speaks of the wish (almost) that we had gone over again in '89:

"Heigh, Ho! We now know that we are both alive. We might as well be in separate planets as be in New York so far as seeing one another goes. Perhaps some day you will go to Europe and I will too, and then we will renew our friendship as of yore. We may go over as commissioners to the '89 exhibit!! and make another batch of enemies. Don't you thirst for it? I trust that thee and thine are well and strong; I can say that much for my side.

"Ever your friend,

"AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS."

I

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

T the half-conscious moment of awakening Prime had a confused impression that he must have gone to bed leaving the electric lights turned on full-blast. Succeeding impressions were even more disconcerting. It seemed that he had also gone to bed with his clothes on; that the bed was unaccountably hard; that the pillow had borrowed the characteristics of a pillory.

Sitting up to give these chaotic conclusions a chance to clarify themselves, he was still more bewildered. That which had figured as the blaze of the neglected electrics resolved itself into the morning sun reflecting dazzlement from the dimpled surface of a woodland lake. The hard bed proved to be a sandy beach; the pillory pillow a gnarled and twisted tree root which had given him a crick in his neck.

When he put his hand to the cramped neck muscle and moved to escape the bedazzling sun reflection, the changed point of view gave him a shock. Sitting with her back to a tree at a little distance was a strange young woman-strange in the sense that he was sure he had never seen her before. Like himself, she had evidently just awakened, and she was staring at him out of wide-open, slate-gray eyes. In the eyes he saw a vast bewilderment comparable to his own, something of alarm, and a trace of subconscious embarrassment as she put her hands to her hair, which was sadly tumbled.

Prime scrambled to his feet and said, "Good morning"-merely because the conventions, in whatever surroundings, die hard. At this the young woman got up, too, patting and pinning the rebellious hair into subjection.

"Good morning," she returned, quite calmly; and then: "If you-if you live here, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me where I am."

Prime checked a smile. "You beat me to it," he countered affably. "I was about to ask you if you could tell me where I am."

"Don't you know where you are?" she demanded.

"Only relatively; this charming sylvan environment is doubtless somewhere in America, but, as to the precise spot, I assure you I have no more idea than the man in the moon."

"It's a dream—it must be!" the young woman protested gropingly. "Last night I was in a city-in Quebec."

"So was I," was the prompt rejoinder. Then he felt for his watch, saying: "Wait a moment, let's see if it really was last night."

She waited; and then-"Was it?" she inquired eagerly.

"Yes, it must have been; my watch is still running.'

She put her hand to her head. "I can't seem to think very clearly. If we were in Quebec last night, we can't be so very far from Quebec this morning. Can't you don't you recognize this place at all?"

Prime took his first comprehensive survey of the surroundings. So far as could be seen there was nothing but the lake, with its farther shore dimly visible, and the primeval forest of pine, spruce, fir, and ghostly birch-a forest all-enveloping, shadowy, and rather forbidding, even with the summer morning sunlight playing upon it.

'It looks as if we might be a long way from 'Quebec," he ventured. "I am not very familiar with the Provinces, but these woods"

She interrupted him anxiously. "A long way? How could it be in a single night?" Then: "You are giving me to

understand that you are not-that you don't know how we come to be here?" "You must believe that, if you can't believe anything else," he hastened to say. "I don't know where we are, or how we got here, or why we should be here. In other words, I am not the kidnapper; I'm the kidnapped-or at least half of them."

"It seems as if it must be a bad dream," she returned, with the frown of perplexity growing between the pretty eyes. "Things like this don't really happen, you know."

"I know they don't, as a rule. I've tried to make them happen, now and then, on paper, but they always seem to lack a good bit in the way of verisimilitude."

The young woman turned away to walk down to the lake edge, where she knelt and washed her face and hands, drying them afterward on her handkerchief.

"Well," she asked, coming back to him, "have you thought of anything yet?"

He shook his head. "Honestly, I haven't anything left to think with. That part of my mind has basely escaped. But I have found something," and he pointed to a little heap of provisions and utensils piled at the upper edge of the sand belt: a flitch of bacon, sewn in canvas, a tiny sack of flour, a few cans of tinned things, matches, a camper's frying-pan, and a small coffee-pot. "Whoever brought us here didn't mean that we should starve for a day or two, at least. Shall we breakfast first and investigate afterward?"

"We?"" she said. "Can you cook?" "Not so that any one would notice it," he laughed. "Čan you?"

She matched the laugh, and it relieved him mightily. It was her undoubted right as a woman to cry out, or faint, or be foolishly hysterical if she chose; the circumstances certainly warranted anything. But she was apparently waiving her privilege.

"Yes, I ought to be able to cook. When I am at home I teach domestic science in a girls' school. Will you make a fire?"

Prime bestirred himself like a seasoned

camper-which was as far as possible from being the fact. There was plenty of dry wood at hand, and a bit of stripped birch bark answered for kindling. The young woman removed her coat and pulled up her sleeves. Prime cut the bacon with his pocket-knife, and, much to the detriment of the same implement, opened a can of peaches. For the bread, Domestic Science wrestled heroically with a lack of appliances; the batter had to be stirred in the tiny skillet with water taken from the lake.

The cooking was also difficult. Being strictly city-bred, neither of them knew enough to let the fire burn down to coals, and they tried to bake the pan-bread over the flames. The result was rather smoky and saddening, and the young woman felt called upon to apologize. But the peaches, fished out of the tin with a sharpened birch twig for a fork, were good, and so was the bacon; and for sauce there was a fair degree of outdoor hunger. Over the breakfast they plunged once more into the mystery.

"Let us try it by the process of elimination," Prime suggested. "First, let me see if I can cancel myself. When I am at home in New York my name is Donald Prime, and I am a perfectly harmless writer of stories. The editors are the only people who really hate me, and you could hardly charge this❞—with an arm-wave to include the surrounding wilderness-" to the vindictiveness of an editor, could you?"

He wished to make her laugh again, and he succeeded-in spite of the sad pan-bread.

"Perhaps you have been muckraking somebody in your stories," she remarked. "But that wouldn't include me. I am even more harmless than you are. My worst enemies are frivolous girls from well-to-do families who think it beneath them to learn to cook scientifically."

"It's a joke," Prime offered soberly; "it can't be anything else." Then: "If we only knew what is expected of us, so that we could play up to our part. What is the last thing you remember-in Quebec?"

"The most commonplace thing in the world. I am, or I was, a member of a vacation excursion party of school