its disgust at the immoderate gin and whisky drinking of the country squires, its revolt from the hazing of the Georgia Military Academy, and its general sense of dismay at the destruction of the elementary ideas of brotherhood by civil strife, in which incidentally most of its own savings were swept away by the looting and burning of a rabble led by drunken Federal soldiers. In consequence of the war, the family moved to New York; and there once more the members of the Straus family showed their practical instinct for civilization by pooling their resources in order to allow one of their number to contribute in their behalf to the intellectual and professional life of their adopted country—to be set apart and "chosen" for the second time and in the American sense.
One dwells on these beginnings, because in spite of all that is occasionally achieved by vagrants who enter the vineyard at the eleventh hour, so much depends upon beginning right and beginning early. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather has a pretty passage in which he tells how John La Farge rebuked him for speaking as if an artist, after starting his picture, were free to develop it in various ways: "He went on to show how the first firm line set on a canvas excludes all incompatible lines thenceforth, so that by the third or fourth leading contour the design must advance by a kind of fatality."
When Oscar Straus entered Columbia College in 1867 he did not see the picture of himself escorted by eight royal carriages to the Sultan's palace or
