of innocent and dignified straightforwardness which much impressed me. Altogether, my acquaintance with him was a contribution of a new sort to the education of my mind. I had passed eight years in the acquisition of those things which an English "gentleman's education" is supposed to offer. These things (in the year 1829) consisted in a very fair knowledge of Latin and Greek. Unquestionably, the eight years which I had spent in learning those languages had brought with them other advantages and other teachings of an altogether priceless sort. But what they professedly had taught me, what I then considered as the net result of my eight years at school, was a competent knowledge of Latin and Greek, and nothing else. Now, here was a young man of my own age, or little more, about whose idiosyncrasy there was something especially simpatico to me, as the Italians say—who knew nothing whatever of the only things which I knew, but knew a whole world of things of which I was profoundly ignorant. I was (of course) full of prejudices also—ecclesiastical prejudices, class prejudices, political prejudices, caste prejudices—all of which were as unintelligible to my new friend as they would have been to a red Indian. He was singularly free from prejudice of any kind—a sort of original, blank-paper mind, on which nothing had been written save what he had consciously written there himself as the result of his own observations of life. I knew other young Americans, and perceived and could have pointed out characteristics which distinguished them. But Powers was not like them. He seemed to me a sort of Adam, a fresh, new and original man, unclassable and unjudgable by any of the formulas or prejudices which served me as means of appreciating men. Despite all this—perhaps because of all this—we soon became great friends. I very shortly discovered that he was wholly and entirely truthful. His "yes" was yes, his "no" was no; and not only that, but what is much rarer still, his "five" or "six" was not five and a quarter or six and a half, but five or six. I remember in him then what I recognized after many, many years in later life, and what is often so amusing a characteristic in simple, upright and truthful minds—the notion that on occasion he could be deep enough to outwit the cunning of the unscrupulous, whereas his loyal unsuspiciousness of evil was such that he might have been cheated by the first shallow rogue who chose to exercise his vulpine craft against him.
When I reached Cincinnati I found him intimate with my brother, and a favorite with my mother, who had formed a high opinion both of his character and of his talents. The latter had already very markedly manifested themselves in that direction which finally decided his career in life. Yet there was little of that dreamy and enthusiastic worship for the abstract beautiful which is generally supposed to be the marking characteristic of the artistic temperament. But he had a wonderful faculty of executing with his hands whatever his mind had conceived, and a mind singularly active in invention and in devising means for the execution of a mechanical end. Had circumstances not made him a sculptor, he might have been—probably would have been—a successful inventor, mechanician or engineer. Throughout life he was an eminently and specially practical man—a man whose tendency was not to dream, but to do. That artistic temperament, as it is generally called, which so often manifests itself in exactly the opposite direction—in a tendency to dream rather than to do, and to allow the pleasures of the ideal to incapacitate those who indulge in them for real work—was so little his that I have never known a more industrious and conscientious worker with his hands. And there was nothing to which he could not turn them, and that with a degree of skill that would often put to shame the attempts of members of the craft which he might be essaying for the first time.
At that time Hiram Powers was, as the saying is, living upon his wits; and they, being such as I have described them, were not likely to fail in producing the wherewithal to do so. There
