aces
and the attitudes of the men, as she worked with eager heart and
careful labor. In the spring of 1874 it was sent to the Royal Academy,
with, we may suppose, not very enthusiastic hopes.

The stirring battle piece pleased the committee, and they cheered when
it was received. Then it began to be talked at the clubs that a woman
had painted a battle scene! Some had even heard that it was a great
picture. When the Academy banquet was held, prior to the opening, the
speeches of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge, both gave
high praise to the "Roll-Call."

Such an honor was unusual. Everybody was eager to see the painting. It
was the talk at the clubs, on the railway trains, and on the crowded
thoroughfares. All day long crowds gathered before it, a policeman
keeping guard over the painting, that it be not injured by its eager
admirers. The Queen sent for it, and it was carried, for a few hours,
to Buckingham Palace, for her to gaze upon. So much was she pleased
that she desired to purchase it, and the person who had ordered it
gave way to Her Majesty. The copyright was bought for fifteen times
the original sum agreed upon as its value, and a steel-plate
engraving made from it at a cost of nearly ten thousand dollars. After
thirty-five hundred impressions, the plate was destroyed, that there
might be no inferior engravings of the picture. The "Roll-Call" was
for some time retained by the Fine Art Society, where it was seen by
a quarter of a million persons. Besides this, it was shown in all the
large towns of England. It is now at Windsor Castle.

Elizabeth Thompson had become famous in a day, but she was not elated
over it; for, young as she was, she did not forget that she had
been working diligently for twenty years. The newspapers teemed with
descriptions of her, and incidents of her life, many of which were, of
course, purely imaginative. Whenever she appeared in society, people
crowded to look at her.

Many a head would have been turned by all this praise; not so the
well-bred student. She at once set to work on a more difficult
subject, "The Twenty-eighth Regiment at Quatre Bras." When this
appeared, in 1875, it drew an enormous crowd. The true critics praised
heartily, but there were some persons who thought a woman could not
possibly know about the smoke of a battle, or how men would act under
fire. That she studied every detail of her work is shown by Mr. W.
H. Davenport Adams, in his _Woman's