oil at her own expense. By and by, her oil-flask appeared to possess a
miraculous property of replenishing itself, and Mr. Powers took measures
to ascertain where the oil came from. It turned out that the servant had
all the time been stealing the oil from them, and keeping up her daily
sacrifice and worship to the Virgin by this constant theft.

His talk soon turned upon sculpture, and he spoke once more of the
difficulty imposed upon an artist by the necessity of clothing portrait
statues in the modern costume. I find that he does not approve either of
nudity or of the Roman toga for a modern statue; neither does he think it
right to shirk the difficulty--as Chantrey did in the case of Washington
--by enveloping him in a cloak; but acknowledges the propriety of taking
the actual costume of the age and doing his best with it. He himself did
so with his own Washington, and also with a statue that he made of Daniel
Webster. I suggested that though this costume might not appear
ridiculous to us now, yet, two or three centuries hence, it would create,
to the people of that day, an impossibility of seeing the real man
through the absurdity of his envelopment, after it shall have entirely
grown out of fashion and remembrance; and Webster would seem as absurd to
them then as he would to us now in the masquerade of some bygone day. It
might be well, therefore, to adopt some conventional costume, never
actual, but always graceful and noble. Besides, Webster, for example,
had other costumes than that which he wore in public, and perhaps it was
in those that he lived his most real life; his dressing-gown, his drapery
of the night, the dress that he wore on his fishing-excursions; in these
other costumes he spent three fourths of his time, and most probably was
thus arrayed when he conceived the great thoughts that afterwards, in
some formal and outside mood, he gave forth to the public. I scarcely
think I was right, but am not sure of the contrary. At any rate, I know
that I should have felt much more sure that I knew the real Webster, if I