“Loudon,” said my father, as he met me at the depot, with a smiling countenance, “if you were to go to Paris, how long would it take you to become an experienced sculptor?”

“How do you mean, father?” I cried.  “Experienced?”

“A man that could be entrusted with the highest styles,” he answered; “the nude, for instance; and the patriotic and emblematical styles.”

“It might take three years,” I replied.

“You think Paris necessary?” he asked.  “There are great advantages in our own country; and that man Prodgers appears to be a very clever sculptor, though I suppose he stands too high to go around giving lessons.”

“Paris is the only place,” I assured him.

“Well, I think myself it will sound better,” he admitted.  “A Young Man, a Native of this State, Son of a Leading Citizen, Studies Prosecuted under the Most Experienced Masters in Paris,” he added, relishingly.

“But, my dear dad, what is it all about?” I interrupted.  “I never even dreamed of being a sculptor.”

“Well, here it is,” said he.  “I took up the statuary contract on our new capitol; I took it up at first as a deal; and then it occurred to me it would be better to keep it in the family.  It meets your idea; there’s considerable money in the thing; and it’s patriotic.  So, if you say the word, you shall go to Paris, and come back in three years to decorate the capitol of your native State.  It’s a big chance for you, Loudon; and I’ll tell you what—­every dollar you earn, I’ll put another alongside of it.  But the sooner you go, and the harder you work, the better; for if the first half-dozen statues aren’t in a line with public taste in Muskegon, there will be trouble.”

CHAPTER II.  ROUSSILLON WINE.

My mother’s family was Scotch, and it was judged fitting I should pay a visit on my way Paris-ward, to my Uncle Adam Loudon, a wealthy retired grocer of Edinburgh.  He was very stiff and very ironical; he fed me well, lodged me sumptuously, and seemed to take it out of me all the time, cent per cent, in secret entertainment which caused his spectacles to glitter and his mouth to twitch.  The ground of this ill-suppressed mirth (as well as I could make out) was simply the fact that I was an American.  “Well,” he would say, drawing out the word to infinity, “and I suppose now in your country, things will be so and so.”  And the whole group of my cousins would titter joyously.  Repeated receptions of this sort must be at the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded into saying that my friends went naked in the summer months, and that the Second Methodist Episcopal Church in Muskegon was decorated with scalps.  I cannot say that these flights had any great success; they seemed to awaken little more surprise than the fact that my father was a Republican or that I had been taught in school to spell colour without the U. If I had told them (what was after all the truth) that my father had paid a considerable annual sum to have me brought up in a gambling hell, the tittering and grinning of this dreadful family might perhaps have been excused.