This must have been soon after the Civil War, for his work at this time breathed the spirit of that struggle. The best of his war pictures is “The Bugler”, a virile figure of a trumpeter on horseback in the dress of the Union army. The handling of the horse recalls Henri Regnault’s “Steeds of Achilles” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Another of Hunt’s popular war pictures was “The Drummer Boy”, a lad with torn shirt and bare legs, rolling out with his drumsticks the call, “To arms, Freemen!” A pretty sketch of the artist’s little girls playing “hospital nurses” was a prime favorite of mine. In the dining room at Oak Glen hang signed lithographs of “The Bugler”, “The Violet Seller”, and “The Woman at the Fountain.” Hunt himself made these faithful reproductions. Years later I saw Hunt’s masterpieces, “The Discoverer” and “The Flight of Night”, in the Albany State Capitol before they were destroyed by the settling of the foundations. The designs fortunately are preserved, but not a vestige remains of the two magnificent frescoes that once glowed in the spaces above the windows of the Senate Chamber. Hunt’s “Talks on Art” were taken down by his scholar, Miss Knowlton, as he flung them out, walking about the studio and criticizing his pupil’s work. The first volume opens thus: “Drawing?” “Yes, or trying.” “All anybody can do is to _try_! Nobody ever _does_ anything! They only try!” Boston was proud of Hunt, declared him one of the greatest, if not the first, living artist. Did not William James, when he decided to become a painter, turn his back upon Paris and return to America to study with William Hunt? Yet it sticks in my memory that Hunt did not realize how much he was beloved and admired. He felt a certain impatience at Boston, expressed in such phrases as: “When anybody in Boston sees a picture he likes, instead of buying it, he goes home and tries to paint one like it.” The “Talks on Art” close with this paragraph: “I was thinking of this subject of Eternity the other night, when I looked at the moon, and saw before it a church spire, a finger pointed upward into space. Next the spire, the moon. Beyond the moon a fixed star. Next,--what? Eternity. A ripple closes over us.” The words were prophetic.