A large-scale model, eight feet long, was made of the building and grounds, which was clear enough to give a good idea of the architectural line of the façade, and the lawns and driveways as they existed. With this model in the class-room, the students had an opportunity to work out their problems methodically and comprehensively.

After a month's study, six figures in sculpture were selected from those made by the students: two standing figures representing France and America as the support of the educational scheme; two reclining figures, one representing the fine arts of France and the other the classic arts; and, lastly, two figures seated, representing soldiers who had thrown down their implements of war, one having taken up the study of sculpture and architecture and the other the study of painting. Their accoutrements had been dropped on the posts placed on each side of the steps leading to the entrance of the building.

At this period of development of their sculptural groups the students were continually "trying out" their composition on the class-room model they had made of the building and grounds. This gave them a chance to see the whole building and their groups at a glance; the ensemble could thus be studied effectively. To visualize the whole setting became an easy matter. This brought up many points for the young men to work out; for instance, that a statue must be of a certain size to be in harmony with the whole; it should be placed so as not to destroy the value of another figure; and each statue should reinforce the value of the whole group and enhance the beauty of the grounds and building.

Again, it was shown hereby that sculpture, no matter how beautifuly modeled, should not stand alone. It must be properly presented on its pedestal.

The light and its surroundings must be in harmony with the subject, just as a book should be appropriately bound, or a picture richly framed, in order to increase the value of the subject.

Thus each student gave a great deal of time to the proper presentation of his statue, every part of the work being done with as much care and excellence in workmanship as was possible in the short time allowed. In this problem the student understood that no matter how fine his ideal might be, he must always consider the probable location of his statue, whether it was to be in the country, in a park, or in the street of a city, or the embellishment of a building. He was shown that if he did not give special attention to this, his work would be only a spot without color, without life, and the idea embodied in his statue would be lost. Finally, what he thought was sculpture might be nothing but a chaotic mass of thoughtless lines.

It should be remarked that the combination of military discipline with school curriculum, thus giving to the students control and guidance, a feature absent from art schools at home, gave the earnest worker encouragement and showed most wholesome results in the work and character-training of the men. Far from finding the discipline irksome, they soon realized that it was the best aid in the serious pursuit of their studies. Verb. sap.

Unfortunately, all this ideal school work was brought to an abrupt close. By the receipt of a military order telling him to leave his study of art, the student suddenly awakened to the fact that he was still a soldier. He was instructed, to pick up his implements of war and go home, there to be free again, but to use for the betterment of his country all the experience and knowledge which his Government had made it possible for him to acquire.

A

LIGHT bag in my hand, I walked very fast up the narrow boardwalk of the old fishing-village, my linen skirt flapping in the sea-breeze. It was the end of a fair day in June, and the low sun was coloring the harbor. I hurried along, a delicious consciousness making my heart warm within me. I was hurrying because I was going to my love. The boardwalk seemed to fly beneath me, and yet it interminably crawled. The old street, under its great willows, straggled relentlessly on, the sunlight warming the green-shuttered white houses and the long line of picket-fences, on which purple shadows were splashed. At last I passed a clear space between houses where fish-nets were drying; the boardwalk took a sudden lift up a little hill, and in the distance dunes appeared.

"Nearly sunset," I thought, hastening over the brow of the rise. "The carpenters will have gone long ago."

My love was a house, a little, low thing, straggling over a bushy dune, but all my own, dreamed, drawn, created out of my veriest soul and self, and nearing completion now at the hands of lackadaisical local workmen. I resented these workmen. I loved every nail they drove, every beautiful fresh board they handled; but I wanted to handle them.

myself. It was tragic to be forced to turn over the realization of one's dream to a bunch of sea-bred insouciants. The little house, though yellow and raw now, would go gray after a winter's weathering, and cuddle that dune as if it grew there. Wild creepers would soon appropriate it and welcome; and bullbriers, convolvulus, wild things of all sorts, could have it if they would leave me just enough space to peep out at storms and sunsets and tides. That was all there was to be seen from my house, all I wanted to see. For months I had been living in a rush and clutter of people and work and plans, and was thirsting to be for once alone, to be cool, silent, creatively apart. Soltitudethere could be no more beautiful word. I had never known much of it, but the idea of it had always fascinated me; to be as that delightful medieval person, whether a lone lost knight or a melancholy and forsaken lady I have quite forgotten, who, on the edge of something also delightfully forsaken and forlorn, a marsh or a mere, was found

alone, and palely loitering,

had grown to be one of my half-conscious dreams. And just now I felt that no extent of solitude could be too great; a year would not be too much.

Except for its edges and eyebrows and other trifles that the sea-going persons were still dawdling over, the little house was done. It smelt ecstatically of clean, new forest lumber, had been wastefully doing it while I was yet cooped up in a city. For weeks the strong salt air had been tangibly rushing through it like a living thing; and at last I had contrived to get away, to spend one stealthy, precious night with this sea-swept creature of my heart and brain a fresh, bare, silent night, with only the tireless wind blowing from the marsh, and the tide chuckling at the foot of the dune.

In short, I meant to sleep in my house, or on it; for as yet it contained no aloof, disdainful beds, but just smooth, sweet-smelling, fawn-colored floors, and it seemed as if this first, symbolic occupying should be a thing between us two alone.

As my feet crunched into the wet, coarse sand of the flats, seaweedy, crabby, and delicious, I sniffed hungrily at the briny air. How good it was to be damp once more after these months of drying up-damp through and through, inside and out; damp hair, damp face, garments, lungs, soul! Here on my left lay the water of the upper harbor, which twisted itself oddly around toward the sea while shaping itself into creeks. Inland on the right -though that way, too, if one wallowed far enough, one met the sea-was a bushy and delightfully unproductive bog, full of suppositious cranberries and ditches and swamp-holes and wetness, stretching vaguely away among the dunes of the back country.

The easiest place in the world to be damp in. And the quiet of it! Instinctively I drew enormous breaths not merely of air, but of horizons and immenseness and silence and space.

Clambering up some rough log steps to the little terrace, a small oasis of flatness built out over the bushes of the dune-side, I saw marsh and creek and oceans in a glory of late light. Even the dull-hued bog was warmed to a brightness; of course the June marshgrass was hectic. Beyond, stood a tall, pale dune with a rim of illuminated green. Schooner-sails rounded the point,

making in, and a faint rat-tat came shoreward from returning "gasoleners," black dots on the shining water to the westward.

And behind me my love patiently waited. Its yellow boards, aglow with a rather awful, orangy color in this light, would not interrupt, I knew, one's joy in the air and sky, for they were full of sky, soaked with air. If its walls, even on the inside, should have their individual and cherished portraits done, they should be given blue high lights, I felt, like a face sketched out of doors.

With a happy sigh I turned to go in. To my amazement, the door was inhospitably locked. I stood quiet a moment, adjusting myself to this rebuff. Of course even these lackadaisical workmen of mine might lock doors occasionally; I had notified no one of my coming.

Feeling unpleasantly stealthy, I tiptoed around to the studio door. Locked, too! Absurdly thorough, these men were getting. I hastened round the corner and tried the third and last door; very much locked, and the window beside it heartlessly nailed down.

A cold dread began to take possession of me. "Why should they fasten up an empty thing so tight?" I thought indignantly. "Half-built houses are always left open." I stepped back to survey my beloved with irritation and with unspeakable, though frustrated, affection. Those upper rooms, so clean and wooden and inviolate! From where I stood I could hear the wind from the sea blowing maddeningly through them. Determindely, I raced around to the terrace again. I would get in. I would not be baffled by cautious idiots. This was my one undiscoverable chance to be alone with my house, the dune being pleasantly out of sight from the village, and my nearest neighbor a harmless pink revolving-light on a sand-bar across the bay; so I prowled devouringly along the house front, only to find every window hopelessly secured. I gave one of them a little shake

"I'd like to break you!" I muttered, then turned desolately away and wandered about the dune-top. The sun had set, and the sky was of green and gold, with copper-red clouds drifting low. The marsh still glowed, the pattern of

its creek a shining pink. The harbor, too was consolingly pink; a few latearriving schooners, anchored near together, had their mainsails up, and colored by the light. Even the tall dune across the bog was faintly rosy; and although dusk was creeping among the folds of the wooded dunes, above them the glory of the sky grew brighter. I strolled through a thick grove of young hornbeams to our little wooded hill, the last obstruction between us and the tide, and perched disconsolately on the low limb of a wild cherry, old and strong, gnarled by its resistance to the storms till it resembled a Japanese dwarf tree. Several of these stood together, overlooking the wide marsh. The tide lapped, the bell-buoy across the water sounded softly now and then--the Angelus of the sea. There was a protecting tenderness in its tone. The whole world seemed wrapped in gentleness and quiet. Gradually I settled back in the support of the cherry-limbs, feeling the mysterious, soothing quality of the evening, its calm and acquiescence, stealing over me. The color on marsh and sea deepened as dusk came down; one big solitary star shone in the east, its reflection making a tiny path on the bay, now glassy calm. And I sat serenely on in the cherry-tree, gazing and listening.

Where was one to sleep? Now that it could not be as I had dreamed, the

matter seemed commonplace and indifferent. There was an inn, of course. The evening crept imperceptibly along. Five lighthouses, bright or dim, white or yellow, blinked their messages over dune and sand-bar and sea. Opposite, my neighborly pink one threw a rosy lance on the dark waters. The air was inexpressibly balmy, sweet with the scent of the matted wild roses on the little hill. After a long wait, a long lightening of preliminary warmth on the horizon, the moon rose. It was enormous and red. Gradually the dunes awoke into a fairy-land of pale and vanishing tones; the creek in the marsh gleamed faintly; and seaward, as the moon ascended, a point of land stood out black in its glittering path.

The breath from the ocean grew ever so slightly chill. My cherry-limb was becoming uncomfortable; and, peering at my watch under the moon-rays, I was astounded to find that it was long past eleven. At the little inn they would be in bed and asleep. How could I have been dreaming so long? Now I must tramp the street of the old town and wake them up; surely an unpleasant time of night for a new-comer to be knocking at unfamiliar doors! I trudged unhappily through the sand of the flats, lamenting my absent-mindedness, and disliking even the innocent moon-gleams on the harbor. It was their fault, and the stars' and the light

houses' and the bell-buoy's. Under their compulsion I had spent four actual idiotic hours in that cherry-tree, and now it would be midnight when I reached the inn.

Through the village my ill-timed footsteps echoed frightfully. As I rounded a little hill, however, a rare perspective stretched away-moonlit street, huddled moonlit roofs, dark-blue splotches under the silvered masses of the willow-tops. There was not a light in any window, nor a soul astir in the whole village. It was sound asleep, as I knew it would be, innocent and sweet in the pale light. Even the boats out on the bay were motionless. I began to feel insidious and stealthy as I crept along, but reached at last, in a solitude which had grown to seem just the least bit oppressive, the quiet heart of the town, where empty wharves, so busy and alive by day, led out into the harbor.

Suddenly, instinctively, I wheeled, walking blindly out on one of them. Impossible to go on, and batter at an impenetrable and sleeping inn. I gripped my useless bag in dislike of the very thought. But how charming the wharf was at this hour, silver gray, empty, calm, and very long, its far end fading imperceptibly into the pale harborwater! I passed the fish-house, with its row of huge fish-pickling tubs tipped up to the air, clean and dry; and sat down in a sheltered nook at the very end of the wharf.

In the strip of sharply defined and jetblack shadow before me, beside another wharf, a white dory bobbed at its mooring-rope. Its slender lines, curving tenderly like the sea-swells they fitted, stood out purely against the shining, dancing dark of the under-wharf. had never seen a shadow so alive, so sparkling, and yet so black. All around a wide stretch of moonlit water glittered, and the lance of red from my lighthouse on the bar threw itself rhythmically down. The moon-white dory gestured exultingly, while under my wharf the tide slopped and flip-flopped

unseen.

What a night! A g.ow of happiness came over me at thought of that house waiting on the dune, with all the wonderful nights to come in its keeping, the

rich twilights, the stars, the dawns, the midnight beat and drift of storms.

"Prrr-ow!" sounded astonishingly at my elbow, and there beside me was a cat, a snow-white and most indubitably domestic cat, tail in air, courtesying and purring ecstatically, somehow restoring, by her household presence, a sense of the accustomed and the decorous in one's aquatic surroundings. She was a pretty, round, creature, balancing on the very edge of the wharf, her whiteness curved against the same jetblack shadow in which the dory delicately swung. cately swung. Around her fur was a shining, iridescent ring of light. She rubbed and courtesied, caressing the planks, making evanescent designs of herself against the darkness of the water. Hearth-loving pussies and cold water do not usually coincide; there was a subtle charm in her ungrudging happiness thus on the brink of the inimic tide.

I looked from dory to cat, both of them moon-white-that delusive, fairydream color that makes an angel out of a girl in a garden; and wondered which was lovelier. They both curved and gestured as exquisitely as if they had done nothing else all their lives. I stretched out a hand to the creature near me, and she promptly stood on her head with rapture, performing marvelous and very Japanese contortions, mingled with soft sounds of appreciation a midnight cordiality, after the stolidity and silence of the village streets, that I found pleasing. The dory, too, demanding my attention, slapped musically at the end of its rope, showing how deftly it could courtesy when little waves came along, and keeping itself artfully against the becoming black of the under-wharf. The cat convoluted joyously, and I marveled at her devotion to the stiff board-ends; her nose was constantly in them.

"I should think, Cat, you would find it fishy enough if you sat up occasionally," I remarked. "I do."

For a wonderful reek seeped out from the fish-house at my back, and the wharf floor, I reflected, must be even more intense and gratifying-to a fishlover. Luckily, I was fond of longshore odors, and so leaned on contentedly