e week, we called it "the
Little Room." Later still we shifted to Ralph Clarkson's studio in the
Fine Arts Building--where it still flourishes.

The fact is, I was a poor club man. I did not smoke, and never used rum
except as a hair tonic--and beer and tobacco were rather distasteful to
me. I do not boast of this singularity, I merely state it. No doubt I
was considered a dull and profitless companion even in "the Little
Room," but in most of my sobrieties Taft and Browne upheld me, though
they both possessed the redeeming virtue of being amusing, which I, most
certainly, never achieved.

Taft was especially witty in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when
several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts
cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively
than most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith,
and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an industry
which was astounding.

Though a noble figure and universally admired, he had, like myself, two
very serious defects, he was addicted to frock coats and the habit of
lecturing! Although he did not go so far as to wear a plaid Windsor tie
with his "Prince Albert" coat (as I have been accused of doing), he
displayed something of the professor's zeal in his platform addresses. I
would demur against the plaid Windsor tie indictment if I dared to do
so, but a certain snapshot portrait taken by a South-side photographer
of that day (and still extant) forces me to painful confession--I had
such a tie, and I wore it with a frock coat. My social status is thus
clearly defined.

Taft's studio, which was on the top floor of the Athenaeum Building on
Van Buren Street, had a section which he called "the morgue," for the
reason that it was littered with plaster duplicates of busts, arms, and
hands. This room, fitted up with shelf-like bunks, was filled nearly
every night with penniless young sculptors who camped in primitive
simplicity amid the grewsome discarded portraits of Cook County's most
illustrious citizens. Several of these roomers have since become artists
of wide renown, and I refrain from disclosing their names. No doubt they
will smile as they recall those nights amid their landlord's cast-off
handiwork.

Taft was an "easy mark" in those times, a shining hope to all the
indigent models, discouraged painters and other esthetic derelicts of
the Columbian Exposition. No artist suppli