And now began visits to the studio, a great room he had built on to his house at New Rochelle. It had an enormous fire place where great logs were burned, and the walls were hung with the most rare and wonderful Indian curios. There he did all the painting which has made him famous in the last twenty years, and all the modelling which has already become so well known and would have eventually made him a name as a great sculptor. He always worked steadily until three o'clock and then there was a walk or game of tennis or a ride. After dinner, delightful evenings in the studio. Frederic was a student and a deep thinker. He liked to solve all questions for himself and did not accept readily other men's theories. He thought much on religious subjects and the future life, and liked to compare the Christian religion with the religions of Eastern countries, weighing them one against the other with fairness and clear logic. And so we sat, many evenings into the night, Frederic and Jack stretched in their big leather chairs puffing away at their pipes, Eva with her needlework, and myself a rapt listener: wondering at this man of genius, who could work with his creative brush all day long and talk with the eloquence of a learned Doctor of Divinity half the night. During the time we were stationed at Davids Island, Mr. Remington and Jack made a trip to the Southwest, where they shot the peccary (wild hog) in Texas and afterwards blue quail and other game in Mexico. Artist and soldier, they got on famously together notwithstanding the difference in their ages. And now he was going to try his hand at a novel, a real romance. We talked a good deal about the little Indian boy, and I got to love White Weasel long before he appeared in print as John Ermine. The book came out after we had left New Rochelle--but I received a copy from him, and wrote him my opinion of it, which was one of unstinted praise. But it did not surprise me to learn that he did not consider it a success from a financial point of view. "You see," he said a year afterwards, "that sort of thing does not interest the public. What they want,"--here he began to mimic some funny old East Side person, and both hands gesticulating--"is a back yard and a cabbage patch and a cook stove and babies' clothes drying beside it, you see, Mattie," he said. "They don't want to know anything about the Indian or the half-breed, or what he thinks or believes." And then he went off into one of his irresistible tirades combining ridicule and abuse of the reading public, in language such as only Frederic Remington could use before women and still retain his dignity. "Well, Frederic," I said, "I will try to recollect that, when I write my experiences of Army Life." In writing him my opinion of his book the year before, I had said, "In fact, I am in love with John Ermine." The following Christmas he sent me the accompanying card.