to the architect’s labor.  When my subject, in his turn, undertook my portrait, he was true to his own principles, and finished it without measurements.  I then, though with some horror at my temerity, asked permission to verify his work with the dividers, and found at the first stroke a difference of at least half an inch in the distance between the eyes.  He looked very much mortified, but said that it was done to ‘give the effect.’  I have had no misgivings since about the economy and wisdom of using the calipers freely.  To be useful, they must be applied with the greatest precision—­so small are the differences upon which all the infinite variety in human countenances depends.  With the aid of my careful measurements, I do in one day what it would cost me a week or two’s work to accomplish without, and I am then able to give my exclusive attention to the modeling.”

He did not regularly devote himself to his art, however, but remained in the employment of the organ and clock maker for some time longer, giving his leisure hours to constant practice.  When he was about twenty-three years old, a Frenchman named Herview opened in Cincinnati a museum of natural history and wax figures.  The latter had been very much broken and disfigured in transportation, and their owner, in despair, begged Powers to undertake the task of restoring them.  The figures were representations of distinguished men and women, and as Powers readily saw that it would be impossible to repair them without having proper likenesses as his guides, he proposed to the Frenchman to make an entirely new composition of the old materials, and one which should attract attention by its oddity.  This was agreed to, and the result was a hideous and ungainly figure, which Powers proposed should be called the “King of the Cannibal Islands,” but to his amazement the Frenchman advertised it as the embalmed body of a South Sea man-eater, “secured at immense expense.”  Powers declared to his employer that the audience would discover the cheat and tear down the museum; but the “man-eater” drew immense crowds, and was regarded as the most wonderful natural curiosity ever seen in the West.  The Frenchman was so well pleased with it that he employed the artist permanently as inventor, wax-figure maker, and general mechanical contriver in the museum.

Powers remained in the Frenchman’s employ for seven years, hoping all the while to earn money enough to devote himself entirely to art, which had now become his great ambition.  His experience was not a pleasant one.  Some of it was so singular, not to say ludicrous, that he shall relate one portion of it in his own language: