Another curious and exceptional example of native artistic ability may be noted here. The studio of Edmonia Lewis, the sculptor, has long been known to tourists visiting Rome. Her history is a curious one. Her father was a Negro, and her mother a Chippewa Indian. She was born at Greenbush, on the Hudson river, and reared among the Indians till the age of fourteen, both of her parents having died in her childhood. Her Indian name was _Suhkuhegarequa_, or Wildfire; but she changed it to that by which she is now known on being admitted to the Moravian school at Oberlin, Ohio. After three years schooling she went to Boston, where, it is said, the sight of the fine statue of Franklin awoke in her the ambition to be a sculptor. She sought out William Lloyd Garrison, and in simple directness told him she wanted to do something like the statue of the printer-statesman. The great abolitionist befriended her. She received needful training in a local studio, started an _atelier_ of her own, and when I saw her in Boston, in 1864, she was modelling a life-size statue emblematic of the emancipation of the race to which she, in part, belonged. Africa was impersonated, raising herself from a prostrate attitude, and, with her hand shading her eyes, was looking at the dawn. Soon after the sculptor went to Rome, and she has there executed works of considerable merit. Her most successful productions may be assumed to reflect the artistic aptitudes of her mother’s race. Her two best works in marble are “Hiawatha’s Wooing” and “Hiawatha’s Wedding.” A Boston critic, in reviewing her works, says: “She has always had remarkable power of manipulation, beginning with beads and wampum, and rising to clay. She has fine artistic feeling and talent, a sort of instinct for form and beauty demanding outward expression.”