But if the true hunter is rare, the union of the hunter and the artist is rarer still. It demands not only the close familiarity, the loving observation, and the sympathy, but also the faculty of creation--the eye which selects what is constructive and beautiful, and passes over what is superfluous and inharmonious, and the hand skilful to carry out what the imagination conceives. In the man whose work I am about to consider, these qualities are developed in a remarkable degree, though it was not until he was a man grown, and had fought with distinction through the civil war, that he himself became aware of the artistic power that was in him. The events of his life, could they be rehearsed here, would form a tale of adventure and vicissitude more varied and stirring than is often found in fiction. He has spent by himself days and weeks in the vast solitudes of our western prairies and southern morasses. He has been the companion of trappers and frontiersmen, the friend and comrade of Indians, sleeping side by side with them in their wigwams, running the rapids in their canoes, and riding with them in the hunt. He has met and overcome the panther and the grizzly single-handed, and has pursued the flying cimmaron to the snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains, and brought back its crescent horns as a trophy. He has fought and slain the gray wolf with no other weapons than his hands and teeth; and at night he has lain concealed by lonely tarns, where the wild coyote came to patter and bark and howl at the midnight moon. His name and achievements are familiar to the dwellers in those savage regions, whose estimate of a man is based, not upon his social and financial advantages, but upon what he is and can do. Yet he is not one who wears his merit outwardly. His appearance, indeed, is striking; tall and athletic, broad-shouldered and stout-limbed, with the long, elastic step of the moccasined Indian, and something of the Indian's reticence and simplicity. But he can with difficulty be brought to allude to his adventures, and is reserved almost to the point of ingenuity on all that concerns himself or redounds to his credit. It is only in familiar converse with friends that the humor, the cultivation, the knowledge, and the social charm of the man appear, and his marvellous gift of vivid and picturesque narration discloses itself. But, in addition to all this, or above it all, he is the only great animal sculptor of his time, the successor of the French Barye, and (as any one may satisfy himself who will take the trouble to compare their works) the equal of that famous artist in scope and treatment of animal subjects, and his superior in knowledge and in truth and power of conception. It would be a poor compliment to call Edward Kemeys the American Barye; but Barye is the only man whose animal sculptures can bear comparison with Mr. Kemeys's.