Brought to this country at the age of six months, the Dublin-born child of a French father and an Irish mother, he soon became more American than the Americans themselves. We see him first as the typical New York sidewalk boy, learning not much in school, but far more from eager contacts in the city boy’s world of home, parents, streets, policemen, processions; the atmosphere of the Civil War stirs his young blood, and will long afterward quicken his sculpture of our Civil War heroes. At fourteen he is by day a cameo-cutter’s apprentice, by night a rapt student of drawing at Cooper Institute. At nineteen, with a hundred dollars and his father’s blessing, he sails abroad for his first three years of foreign study and travel; in Paris and Rome he learns and earns; he has a stout heart, a lean purse, and an undying passion for his art. His return to New York with a few small commissions picked up, as the custom then was, from American travellers sojourning in Rome; his second stay abroad; his early struggles to obtain a footing; his marriage and subsequent three years in Paris while creating the Farragut; his ardent friendship with Stanford White, John La Farge, and other strong personalities of the day;--surely all this seems quite the usual story. But Saint-Gaudens had always his own innermost unusualness that somehow placed him above his fellows; and the victorious completion of the Farragut in 1881 was but the first of a long line of signal triumphs. And even his almost forgotten triumphs (for example, the great improvement in our coinage initiated by his endeavor) are signal triumphs. There was no branch of his art in which he did not excel; it was an art designed in general for the flowingness of bronze rather than for reproduction within the confines of the marble block. [Illustration: STATUE OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]