Although Augustus was the son of a French shoemaker, named Bernard Paul St. Gaudens, and a young Irish girl of Dublin, who lost her heart to Bernard as she sat binding slippers in the same shop where he made shoes, we call him an American, for a great famine swept Ireland when little Augustus was only six months old, and the young parents sailed to America with all haste. They landed in Boston, where the mother and baby waited for the father to find work in New York. He soon sent for them, and as Augustus and his two brothers grew up in that city and always lived in this country, he seems to belong to us. Shoemakers, as a rule, are not rich men, and Mr. St. Gaudens did not pay very strict attention to his work, for he joined so many societies and clubs that these took his time. His patrons would never have had their shoes made or mended if he had not hired help. Then, also, his sons learned to cobble shoes very young. Before Augustus went into his father's shop to work, and when he had a good many hours out of school, he found the busy streets of New York exciting enough. He was laughing and merry, so that he made friends from the Bowery to Central Park. He had only to sniff hungrily at the bakery to have the good-natured German cook toss him out brown sugar-cakes, and if he fell off the wharves, or ran too near big fire-engines, some kind policeman rescued him. He was not a bad boy. Probably the worst thing he did was to join some other boys in the string joke. They used to tie strings from the seats of the bakery-wagons to the posts of high stoops and watch these strings knock off hats as men hurried by. Sundays were gala days. If the sun shone, all the boys in the neighborhood went over to New Jersey on the ferry-boat. Augustus's father always gave him and his brothers five cents each. Two cents took a boy over to New Jersey, two cents brought him back, and there was the other cent for candy or gum. It was good sport to chase each other through the green fields, hunt birds' nests, and climb trees, but the best fun came on the way back, when the boys sat in a long row at the front of the boat, letting their legs dangle over the edge, watching the life on the river.