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Drawn by Alfred Brennan. Owned by Thomas Shields Clarke

MODEL OF FLAG-SHIP OF A DUTCH ADMIRAL OF ABOUT 1520

made by a sailor. To the fastidious modellover it is a work of loveliness above the water-line, but carries contradiction with it, like the skeleton at the feast, because it has not hull enough to float a toy-boat.

Mr. Wiles's brig of 1812 has three small boats, two of them carried outboard. There is a real compass, which works, in her miniature binnacle, and there is a real wheel just abaft it. The wooden guns projecting from her ports were carved out by hand, as were the masts and all the rest of the ship. She looks so businesslike, it seems as though she should be spoken of as a ship rather than as a model. That Mr. Wiles was three years in making her will not seem a surprising statement when it is told that there are in her rigging more than five hundred blocks of various kinds. To see these half a thousand blocks rigged on this two-foot model is to recall with some vividness the old sailor's joke on the landlubber, whom the tar asked to figure out how many pulleys there were on his ship. And when the landsman had computed awhile, the shell-back, grinning, conde

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scended to tell him that there were none: they were "all blocks on shipboard."

sailing-ships only, and he cares nothing Although his penchant is for models of for those of steam-vessels, Mr. Wiles was tion, a neglected model of one of our pubvery glad to pick up, as one of his colleclic ships of the time when builders had not yet confidence enough in steam-power to dering through the Washington navy-yard do away entirely with sails. He was wanwhen he fell into conversation with an old sailor who had obtained an unimportant post as an attendant in the yard. The old tar, in discussing models, said, in response to a question whether he knew where any might be obtained, that he had at his home timely and undignified end, not because he one which he had rescued from an unwanted the model, but because, as a genuidly by and endure its ignominy. ine old son of the sea, he could not stand

It had been made by some painstaking enthusiast, but had passed into careless of the officers' children to play with. As hands, and at last had been given to some

they were battering it idly to pieces about the yard, our sailorman determined to appropriate it, that it might at least be held. in honor by a real lover of the sea. He had not repaired it, but had taken it to his home. He said that it was, he thought, a model of Admiral Farragut's famous old Hartford. At his noon-hour he went home and fetched it, and it now rests where it will receive the care it deserves. Mr. Wiles thinks it is not a model of the Hartford, but rather of one of the general type of American steam frigates of about 1861, such as was the Merrimac before she was made into an ironclad. He has fixed up the model, which has most of its standing rigging up, but no sails.

There is another model with a curious lineage in the Wiles collection. It is that of an old oyster schooner which used to ply from New York, and is about as near perfect as the model-collector is likely to find. The schooner was the Hausman, and her owner was so proud of her in the old time that he had the builder make a

model of her that is exact even to the double skin and ribs. The model passed at length to a Sixth Avenue fish-store, where at first it was an object of pride. But, alas! the carefully stitched sails became soiled, and the tidy fishmonger pitched them away and replaced them with home-made canvases-Beau Brummel attired by a seamstress!

But Mr. Wiles got her, and she is a beauty. She is seven feet long from the tip of the jib-boom to the end of the mainboom. She is seventeen and one half inches in beam, has a depth of hold of five inches, and the maintopmast rises four feet, six inches above the deck. She has a notably fine stern to slip down the waves; her cabin is fitted with a round seat; she has hatches, a hold; and a veritable scuttlebutt, or water-barrel, rests in its chocks on the deck.

Several model-collectors had been lying low for a model which for years was held at a high price by an international dealer of New York. Not long ago it came un

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ALFRED BRENNAN

Drawn by Alfred Brennan. Built by Irving R. Wiles

MODEL OF A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH SHIP-OF-THE-LINE

der the hammer at a sale. The collectors walked quietly and unobtrusively into the gallery and seated themselves where they would not attract attention. For fear of meeting foes, they did not look for friends, and the bidding went quietly on. The model is now in the Wiles collection, and a curious one it is. It is a model of a Dutch East-Indiaman of the seventeenth century, though it reached this country by way of Germany. It is fitted for guns, as were all the big merchantmen of the time, and it has three decks, although it is not technically a "three-decker." It is so carefully made that the inner skin may be seen. The model is very old, but the upper spars of the full-rigged ship of the time are all standing.

The planking has been carefully, but clumsily done, the clumsy work there contrasting strangely with the delicate ladders, or companionways, that lead from deck to deck. The craft has odd, ornamental wales, and a similar top-timberline, and her quarter-galleries are done in yellow, red, gold, and black. The figure

head is a lion, which wears a crown. The mainstay is looped about the mast by a slip-knot, which is moused to keep it from slipping. An old-fashioned windlass sweeps all the way athwartships just abaft the foremast, and above the center of it is an arched belfry.

In The Village Belle, a type of the Long Island scalloper, a shallow, broad, centerboard sloop for working in bay waters, Mr. Wiles has perhaps made his most accurate and finished work. She is fifteen inches long, and even in her chocks seems as though resting in the water, so perfect are her lines in entrance and run. It is a peculiarity of Mr. Wiles that he tries to make the models which he constructs look as the ships or boats actually did or do when performing their natural functions on the seas. In this scalloper, one can not overlook the spring of the bowsprit, the topmast pitched forward, the boom bent up at the end, as booms get in working-boats from being supported at the end by the topping-lift. And forward is the club, or false jib-boom, which working

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Drawn by Alfred Brennan. From the collection of Alexander W. Drake

MODEL OF THE "SANTA MARIA," AFTER THE COPY OF THE FLAG-SHIP
OF COLUMBUS, EXHIBITED AT THE CHICAGO WORLD'S FAIR
IN 1893 BY THE SPANISH GOVERNMENT

boats sometimes use, so that the jib may be operated from aft by one sheet in coming about. She has, too, the figurehead which fishermen put even upon yachts that they make over into working-boats, as they do not like the straight bow of the yacht.

Aboard are anchor and cable, the allessential "ground tackle." A galley-pipe A galley-pipe or chimney projects above the cabin deck, for the scalloper cooks aboard his craft; the cabin doors are open, the companionway slide is pushed forward, the sliding window-covers, or port-shutters, of the cabin are opened; the forward hatch is divided by the centerboard, and the centerboard pendant is taut, the board being hauled up. An altogether right little, tight little, shipshape craft is The Village Belle.

There may be a personal reason for the gratifying success of the amateur modelmaker in this miniature boat. One day, seated aft in a small sailboat, cruising on Block Island Sound, with the Atlantic rollers coming along, and sometimes combing, constant reminders of the possibilities of the great open beyond, Mr. Wiles remarked with delight:

"We enjoy no advantage over the earlier mariners in this boat-the same elements to contend with and virtually the same

appliances with which to meet them; the same problems, and only the personal resources for grappling with them; no machinery. This is the free life of the sea, with all that it means and all its chances."

This model of a Long Island workingboat will probably some time be the center of one of the most interesting collections of models which a private collector is likely to get together, if Mr. Wiles carries out an intention he has formed. It is his desire to secure models of the fishing-craft of all regions and all nations. No vessels that float are more picturesque than those in which the fishers among all coast peoples go about their piscatorial pursuits. A Venetian fisherman's boat may be seen on page 523 of this paper. As the marine-painter scorns the smart yachts, with their immaculate canvas, and makes his pictures of the weathered working-boats, with their patched and stained and mildewed sails, so the model-collector, with an eye to the picturesque in his fad, comes to admire the boats and vessels in which men rough it in all weathers-boats that take on an air and substance of the sea that never attaches to the prim pleasure-craft, or even to the ocean giants of commercial transportation.

A large undertaking, and the work of years, it will be to acquire such a collection as a representative lot of the world's fishing-craft; but if a man has never known pertinacity before, he becomes a personification of it when he develops into a collector and tastes the joys of adding new specimens to his cherished possessions. In the case of Mr. Wiles, he will unquestionably build some of these models, for he will hunt till he finds plans, or, failing that, will build from pictures; but the

The Indiaman model bears the white stripe along her sides which the East-Indiamen had in order to make them resemble frigates while at sea, and so discourage pirates at a distance. The chief difference in long-range appearance between these merchantmen and the frigates was in the rigging, the merchantmen not being so heavily rigged as the war-ships; and at a distance skilled men had to distinguish between them by this fact.

The collecting of models seems to run

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work of searching for existing models of these boats invites his assiduous attention for many moons to come in the hours to be devoted to the model-collection.

What for a time at least will be the last of his self-built old-time great vessels, a British East-Indiaman with thirty-six guns, has an added interest as it pictures 'not merely a British East-Indiaman, but, in point of type, the Bonhomme Richard of illustrious memory; for it will be recalled that to the immortal Paul Jones was given not a war-ship, but an Indiaman, and with the Indiaman he won his terrific battle with the more powerful Serapis.

somewhat among artists and lovers of art in this city, some collecting for the love of the models and the sea, and some, perhaps, merely with an eye to the real beauty in a fine model of a rolling chariot of the great waters. Among other collectors in New York who possess several fine models are Thomas Shields Clarke, A. W. Drake, and Carleton T. Chapman. The late Stanford White was another. Mr. Drake has a Spanish caravel and an East Indiaman among others. His caravel is a model of Columbus's Santa Maria which was made in Spain and sent by the Spanish Government to this country at the time of the Columbian Exposition. Mr. Chap

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