In the Library of Congress I was given one of the rooms to the left of the doorway on the first floor of the building. It is called a curtain corridor. There were nine semicircular panels, nine feet in width at the bottom; therefore the radius was four and a half feet. All such tympanums are stilted, making this radius in reality about four feet ten inches. The argument was, how to get the human figure into a space so low. I did not want to make them half size or even under life, and my decision proved very wise. Elihu Vedder made his figures undersize and the result was that the rest of us dwarfed him. My choice of subject was the Nine Muses, and I resolved to make them sitting down. Terpsichore, the Muse of Dancing, sitting? I contrived to bend her over so that she just squeezed in. There is an old work of the early Greeks in bas-relief of Terpsichore that is one of the most beautiful compositions I know of. She is bending down and arranging her sandal. If I had not been fundamentally opposed to that class of theft, I would have used the idea; but a copy of anything, no matter how great, is never so good as one’s own conception. It is always unwise for an artist to have the classics about him at any time, and he should _never_ have any of them near by to influence him when he is doing compositional work. There were thirty-six pendentives in the domes of the ceiling, which I decorated with little figures, using no models, but painting directly upon the walls, composing as I went along. I shall never forget this experience. It was in the summertime, and a hot spell struck Washington. Anyone who knows the capital will realize what this means. I was under contract to finish it at a certain time, and here I was working in these little sealed domes (which never were and never could be ventilated), while the thermometer was so high that eighty people died one day from sunstroke. It was mephitic. I was so terrified that I almost lived on milk and limewater. Right here I would like to say something about health. It is important, perhaps even more for an artist than for any other class of person, to keep himself in trim. Burning up tons of nervous energy, living perhaps a precarious existence, it is necessary that he take himself in hand early in life and learn about his own body. We are not all constituted the same and what is one man’s weakness is another man’s strength. In my own case, I was practically an invalid up to thirty, when I made up my mind to overcome my ailments. Artistic effort needs a tremendous amount of vitality back of it to carry it out, and the sensitiveness which accompanies the creative temperament is easily a prey to small discomforts. Learn your limitations and you can correct them beforehand. Knowing my stomach was my weak link, I treated it with care during the heat at Washington and came out with no disaster.