It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and some lettering were substituted. Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend, Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who, while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect. Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design, beautiful in execution. Whatever he did, he put the best of himself into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died: "I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill. Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I am told, and all his American friends seem to have been there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe." _Robert Taber_ Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's. They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York, had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in "Peter the Great" and other plays. Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.