Sprang to his feet? Where must he have been? Lying behind something. I had shot, fished, and traveled over this land all my life—it was only just across the river from our house—and there was nothing there in my boyhood behind which a man could have hidden. I looked this up and found there had formerly been a wall so that the market women during the spring freshet could walk dry shod in the days of the Concord River’s overflow. Considering the fact that I had never seen green grass anywhere near Boston on the 19th of April, it may seem strange that I put it into my decoration. Of course, I preferred it for my color scheme, but I actually found a letter from a woman of the period and of that date, saying, “I saw green grass waving out of my window this morning.” It appears that that year they had an unusually early spring. [Illustration: “THE RETURN OF THE FLAGS” Panel by Edward Simmons, Boston State House _Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print_ _Copyright by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston_ ] When I painted my second panel, I thought of the order that the Pope gave to Raphael to paint him putting out a fire by the power of God. The Pope naturally saw himself the principal figure and was disgusted when he found that Raphael had made him a little figure on a balcony in the distance, the artist preferring a group of maidens rushing around in the foreground with jugs of water as being more interesting to paint. Now my subject was War, and when I chose as my other panel “The Return of the Battle Flags into the Custody of the State after the Civil War,” many people naturally expected that the governor and officials would occupy the prominent place on the canvas. The governor was an admirable man and did a great deal toward winning the war, but in actual fact he was about five feet high, “pot-gutted,” bald headed, and not an attractive object from a painter’s point of view. I did not wish to do a group of portraits, but a decoration, so I imagined myself in the park, looking up at the State House, with a line of color sergeants marching up the steps to present the flags to the governor and officials waiting above. As they were two or three hundred feet away from the gate, I had to reduce them to twelve or fifteen inches in height, thereby making lifelong enemies of several who were still alive. When the G. A. R. found I was not to do the officers, but the color sergeants, my trouble was by no means over, for the wives and relatives of more than a dozen sent me photographs of their beloved ones, some of whom were dead, some of whom had lost an arm in the war. Many of the likenesses were of the individual thirty years later than the day he carried the flag! _All_, of course, expected to be represented in the decoration by a life-sized portrait. I obviated this difficulty by making them march up the stairs away from one, as they naturally would have done, and a back view is not a good portrait.