American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
The Cincinnati statue of General Harrison is the work of L.T. Rebisso,
who made the statue of General McPherson which stands in one of the
circular parks in Washington, and the equestrian statue of General
Grant for the city of Chicago. Its cost, which, exclusive of the
pedestal, is twenty-seven thousand dollars, is paid by the city.
Mr. Rebisso has given a portrayal of Harrison unlike any of the more
familiar pictures. These usually present a decrepit old man, from
whose eye have vanished that fire of youth and flash of soul which
made Harrison a leader of men. The Rebisso statue, as will be seen by
the reproduction of it given herewith, presents a soldier in the full
flower of vigorous manhood. And this conception is no mere ideal of
fancy, but is taken from a portrait painted in 1812, which now hangs
in the house of a grandchild of General Harrison near the old North
Bend homestead.
[Illustration: THE SILENT WITNESS.]
THE SILENT WITNESS
BY HERBERT D. WARD
There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more
from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion
and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and
trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle
from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He
carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted
farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and
asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he
know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the
empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners
of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife
plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in
a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes
contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of
anxiety.
There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to
be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the
hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law
to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand
old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and
grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety
homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?
Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what
was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship,
Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount
Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the
tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred
acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the
poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of
boulders in the mountains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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