mentos" of various sorts and sizes. Whether these were distributed or sold it is difficult to ascertain, as the fact is mentioned only with bated breath, and the details of this piece of vandalism cannot be ascertained. The pulpit was not unfit for use, as far as I could learn, but was displaced as a mere matter of taste or emolument.

The chancel railing is the same at which Washington knelt to commune; the tablets, with the Lord's prayer and commandments upon them, are also unchanged. The original flagging in the aisles has been overlaid or replaced with wood.

The church stands as squarely and solidly in the midst of its quiet graves as though the passing centuries were of no moment. It has a sunny, open-air, Old World look, such as we see in pictures of quiet village churches in England, and seems to be an integral part of the town, with a well-established right to be there and not an impertinent irrelevancy, as most city church-yards are.

A delightful sail takes the visitor from Alexandria to Mount Vernon. The approach to the place is very fine. From the greenery of the high wooded hills the pillared colonnade and the expanse of front gleam out. The house,

with a tawdry set of modern ebonized furniture covered with red and yellow plush. Nothing could be more out of taste, especially in combination with the bar-room window-shade of yellow and pink.

A panel over the mantel-shelf in the west parlors is filled with an old-style oil landscape glazed. It looks as though the trees and mountains of lugubrious hue had been pressed for preservation under the glass. A chair, with greenslatted back and rush seat, is one of the pieces of furniture which came over in the muchpacked Mayflower. Other pieces of original furniture, a globe, a portrait of Washington by Trumbull, and another by Gilbert Stewart, are standing about the room. Among other things, a white-and-gold sixteenth-century chair from the château at Chavagniac Auvergne, the birthplace of Lafayette, is to be found here. Over the mantel-shelf is the coat of arms of the Washington family, and in the fire-brick at the back of the chimney is a crest and the letters G. W. in relief. The river-room or east parlor has the original writing-desk, clock, and spinningwheel used by Martha Washington. In the entrance hall still hangs the key of the Bastile as it hung in the days of Washington.

The only objects of interest in the banqueting-hall, which is to be furnished by New York, are the model of the Bastile and the mantel-piece of Carrara and Sienna marble, an ugly, clumsy, but curious architectural structure. The windows in the front of the house are small, with tiny panes, but on the end, in the banqueting-hall, is a triple window, also having small panes; but the middle window is higher than the others and arched, giving quite an unusual and pretty effect.

In the "family kitchen" is a great widemouthed fire-place with crane. Here we (my friend, one of "de fam'ly," and myself) were greeted by a handsome mulatto woman, born on the place, who brought forcibly to mind "the days that are no more," with her sweet voice, and gentle ways, and perfect courtesy. A sign upon the door, that milk was sold there for the benefit of the association, made me call for a glass. After I had taken it I asked the price. She said with the most gentle politeness and a suggestion of a courtesy, "Fi' cents a glass, onless, ladies, you will kindly accept it from the 'sociation." The whole air of the place has somehow escaped the sordid quality which makes most show-places an offense to the reverent visitor. The attendance, from that of the humblest negro to that of the extremely courteous and obliging superintendent, gives one the impression of being made welcome to a home, rather than that their services were mere perfunctory offices, performed for pay.

Here, there, and everywhere, among the relics of old times, the bulging form and bright blue color of hand-grenades impertinently remind us of the present, and sweep away the gathering illusions.

By far the most interesting relics in the house are those in the sleeping-chambers. "Lafayette's room" has still the original fourposter, with heavy tester and hangings, and the desk and dressing-table, which served the marquis on his visits to the Washington family. In one of the rooms hang two curious old watercolors, which our guide said had been sold when Mr. Augustine Washington disposed of the furniture of the house, but which "were so 'lapidated that they di'n' take 'em away." In this same room hung a tripartite mirror, once the property of Light-horse Harry Lee.

Miss Custis's room had in it a very quaint and beautiful chair which came over with Lord Baltimore,-presented by Miss Harper of Baltimore, into whose hands it had fallen when the furniture was scattered abroad after the sale. The mirror at which sweet Eleanor Custis had made her toilet and the steps by which she climbed into her lofty, curtained bed are still in their old places. In another room is a curious candlestick of Mrs. Washington's, an upright rod supporting a sliding crossbeam, in each end of which is a brass candlestick, the base of which, a tripod, rests upon the floor.

But the interest of the whole house centers in the room where Washington died,-“The gen'al's room, the room I likes de bes' in de house," as the servitor called it, in a tone of genuine and reverent affection. Just where the great man lay a-dying eighty-eight years ago, the bed now stands, and beside it the light stand on which are the rings left by his medicine-glasses, unchanged since that day. The secretary at which he wrote, the hair-covered trunk in which he carried his possessions, the surveyor's tripod he had used, the cloak he threw about his shoulders when he went over the farm, the leathern chair in which he sat, the covering cut away by vandal hands, are all there. There was something, in spite of these few discordant notes, that seemed peculiar to that room. I could not feel that thousands of eyes had looked upon it with idle curiosity, but as though it had been kept sacred all these years, and was yet redolent of the memories which have set it apart forever.

"Many wonders," said our guide," why Mrs. Wash'n'ton died up in de attic, and not in de gen'al's room. It was de custom in de family to shut up a room for two years after a death had happened in it, an' dis room was shut up. Mrs. Wash'n'ton went up in de attic an' dere she staid for eighteen mu'n's till she died dere. She never had no fire in de winter, an

OUTLINE OF THE BAS-RELIEF OF THE SONS OF PRESCOTT HALL BUTLER.

LL of us who care for art and to whom

Gaudens's father was of southern France, his mother was Irish. He himself is a New Yorker, well-nigh from birth,- having been brought to this city from Dublin, his birth-place, while yet an infant. He was early apprenticed to a New York cameo-cutter and faithfully served his time, and even during the period of his study in Paris he devoted half his working hours to bread-winning in the exercise of his trade. He attributes much of his success to the habit of faithful labor acquired at this time, and speaks of his apprenticeship as "one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him." Perhaps one may attribute to it, also, part of that mastery of low-relief which is such

gratitude to that band of artists who, in this latter part of the nineteenth century, have resuscitated for us the dead art of sculpture. Sculpture, which has in other times been one of the first of the arts to develop, has in our time been the latest. Music is the child of our own century; poetry we have had and have; painting, after a long lethargy, was already awakened to new life; but twenty years ago sculpture was, to all seeming, dead. It is true there were a few exceptional talents, such as those of Barye and of Rude, and that Jouffroy had produced one interesting work, "The Secret;" but, broadly speaking, sculpture could not be counted as one of the living arts. That it is now alive again, full of fresh vigor and moving on to the conquest of new realms of beauty for us and those that shall come after us, we owe first of all to Paul Dubois, whose little St. John the Baptist in the Salon of 1863 was indeed as "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," and, after him, to a band of younger men who hailed the advent of the new prophet, and, gathering around him, formed the present French school of sculpture, the third of the three great schools of sculpture that the world has seen.

One of these men we have among us, and to him we owe a special debt in that his work is not only for us in common with the rest of the world, but is first for us,- is here in our own country, in the midst of us,-delighting us, and forming the taste of our children.

As the first step in the resuscitation of sculpture was the abandonment of the stilted imitation of third-rate Roman antiques, and the study of the works of the Italian Renaissance, it was a happy coincidence that Augustus St. Gaudens should have had much such an apprenticeship as a Florentine sculptor of the fifteenth century might have had. St.

In 1868 he went to Paris to begin the serious study of his art, and after working for some time in the Petite Ecole entered the studio of Jouffroy in the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

This was the year of the Universal Exposition, and in that Exposition he saw the "Florentine Singer" of Paul Dubois, which had received the medal of honor two years before at the Salon. This statue, in which the very spirit of the Renaissance breathed again, must have marked an epoch for him, as it did for modern sculpture.

Many of the brilliant sculptors of to-day were educated in the studio of Jouffroy; Falguière and St. Marceau had left it shortly before St. Gaudens entered it; Mercié was his fellow-student there, and he thus became a part of the young and vigorous movement of contemporary sculpture. He afterwards went to Rome, and finally, returning to this country, was given in a happy hour the commission for the Farragut statue in Madison Square. From the time when that statue was exhibited, in the plaster, at the Salon of 1880, his talent was recognized and his position assured.

The purpose of this article is to attempt some sort of analysis of this talent, and to explain the grounds of admiration for Mr. St. Gaudens's work.

Sculpture, in its primary conception, is the most positive and the most simple of all the arts. Painting deals with the visual aspects of things, with light and color, and with the appearance of form. Sculpture deals only with actual form. A statue does not give the visual image of the form of a man; it gives the actual form. It follows from this that sculpture is, in a sense, an easier art than painting. One often sees a mere tyro, who would be altogether lost among the complications and conflicting difficulties of painting, produce, by