There is credit in sticking to a hard job, and there is equal credit in a manly refusal to continue to work under intolerable conditions. Saint-Gaudens’s act brought its own reward, for his next employer, Mr. Jules le Brethon, a shell-cameo cutter, was a man unlike Avet in every particular, and it was through this new connection that the path to Saint-Gaudens’s career as a sculptor was opened to him. With his characteristic foresight in availing himself of every opportunity, the boy had early begun to devote his evenings to the study of drawing in the free classes at the Cooper Institute. Every day at six he left his work, and after a hurried supper, hastened to his classroom. He was appreciative of the great opportunity which the school afforded him, and he threw himself with all his soul into his work. “I became a terrific worker, toiling every night until eleven o’clock after the class was over. Indeed, I became so exhausted with the confining work of cameo-cutting by day and drawing at night, that in the morning mother literally dragged me out of bed, pushed me over to the washstand, where I gave myself a cat’s lick somehow or other, drove me to the seat at the table, administered my breakfast, and tumbled me downstairs out into the street, where I awoke.” When the courses at the Cooper Union were finally accomplished, Saint-Gaudens took up new night work at the National Academy of Design, and it was here that his first appreciation of the antique came to him, and his first practice in drawing from the nude—training so fundamental for his great work in coming years. Early in the year 1867 came another turning-point in his life. Ever since he had first begun to work, Saint-Gaudens had been giving his wages to his father to pay his share of the family expenses. And now the father, realising that the boy’s earnestness and ability were deserving of every opportunity which he could afford, made the offer of a trip to Europe, where he might see the art of the older civilizations and return to the United States broadened by his experience and observations. Saint-Gaudens was nineteen years old. His father had paid for his passage in the steerage, and in his pocket were a hundred dollars which had been saved out of his wages. Arriving in Paris in a “mixed state of enthusiasm and collapse,” he spent a few days visiting in the household of an uncle, and then began his search of employment at cameo-cutting and of admission to the School of Fine Arts. Work was soon found in the establishment of an Italian. But entrance to the school was a more difficult proposition, and in order that no time should be wasted while he was waiting, he enrolled in a modeling school, working there mornings and nights and supporting himself on what he earned at cameo-cutting in the afternoon.