THIEVES

(A Ring cartoon of 1868-Hoffman the screen to cover the city frauds)

The poet-editor of the New York Evening Post, another admirer of Nast at this time, one morning sent a request that the artist drop around and meet a young lady who Nast agreed but forgot to

had found pleasure in his pictures.
go, and Mr. Bryant wrote a little formally to remind him.

Dear Sir:

Miss Hatfield has been here this morning in hope of meeting you. As you did not come, she desired to know if it will be agreeable to you to come next Friday, as soon after half-past nine in the morning as may suit your convenience. I shall come in on that day from the country, and she will be here.

To Thos. Nast, Esq.

Yours respectfully,

W. C. Bryant.

Nast went this time and commemorated the occasion to the extent of making a good-natured caricature of the poet. That the picture did not offend the subject is shown by his comment in a subsequent letter to Miss Hatfield.

As to the caricature, it is very clever, and if the subject were any other than myself, I have no doubt that I should like it. All that could be asked of me, I think, is that I should not object to it.

* Mr. Burlingame proceeded on his tour, from America, negotiating numerous treaties for the Chinese Government. But in St. Petersburg he was taken suddenly ill, and died (February, 1870), mourned in many nations.

The years of Reconstruction had constituted an epoch of chaos and disorder. It was the inevitable transition period, when the war-shifted from the field forum-was to rage and rankle, and fade into purposeless discussions of no definite beginning, no climax and no absolute end so long as the issues themselves were not wholly dead. The apostasy of Andrew Johnson had distorted even such measures of good as had resulted from that unhappy interregnum which, viewed in retrospect, seems as a dark smirch

on the nation's history.

But with the return of the seceding states and the election of Grant, hostilities became less openly violent. They might develop again with another presidential contest, but four years must elapse between, and the public impulse was for peace.

GREATNESS!"

Nast was in Washington for the inaugural ceremonies, and on the morning of March 3d, when everybody was mystified as to the members of the new Cabinet, he made a drawing of Grant shaking five cats out of a bag. The cats were all complete except their heads. When the sketch had proceeded thus far the artist took it around to Grant's headquarters and sent it in with a polite request that the President of to-morrow should add the heads. Grant did not comply with the request, but good-humoredly promised to do so on Friday at noon, by which the public knew that there was to be no delay in his selections.

It was in April of this year that the artist received a handsome public recognition of his services. His fellow members of the Union League Club under the leadership of Colonel Rush

C. Hawkins, formerly commander of " Hawkins' Zouaves," combined in the presentation of a beautiful silver vase, representing loyal Art armed with porte-crayons piercing the openmouthed dragons of Secession. This vase, designed by Colonel Hawkins, bore the following inscription:

Thirty-six members of the Union League Club unite in presenting this vase to Thomas Nast, as a token of their admiration of his Genius, and of his ardent devotion of that Genius to the Preservation of his Country from the schemes of Rebellion.

April, 1869.

The Union League Club-itself an organization for devising ways and means to preserve the Union-thus conferred upon Thomas Nast its highest form of recognition.

The presentation took place on the evening of the 27th and was a memorable affair. Many of the nation's leaders gathered to see this public honor done to one who less than a quarter of a century before had been a little Bavarian boy in the meadows back of Landau. If only the Commandant of the barracks might have been there to see it all, and to listen to the fine things that were said about the little lad of whom he had prophesied so kindly. Senator Henry Wilson, afterwards Vice-president, James Parton, Richard Grant White, and others contributed words of praise. In Nast's reply to the presentation speech he refers to himself standing just beyond the threshold" of his career, and had

he waited to review his life through the perspective of years, could not have expressed the truth more exactly.

he

It was during the summer of 1869 that the Alabama claims against England for the destruction of Union merchantmen by Confederate commerce destroyers built in British ports, merited frequent pictorial attention. The cartoon of June 26th relates to this complication and is notable for two reasonsfirst, in showing the better feeling which now existed between England and America, and second, the evidence in it of a marked change in the artist's method. Drawings for illustration were still made on wood blocks and engraved by hand. Most of Nast's earlier work had been done with fluid color, washed in with a brush. In the "Not Love but Justice" above mentioned, the artist, inspired by a masterly drawing in London Punch, discarded the brush and used his pencil with a care and insight scarcely comprehended before.

It was as if, all at once, he had "found himself." Former methods were used less and less, while his immediate and wonderful mastery of "cross-hatch" pencil work resulted in those inimitable drawings by which he will longest be remembered.

Domestic and moral cartoons were continued through 1869. The Weekly, on July 19th, published a page picture relating to the opening of the Pacific Railroad, and the "All Hail and Farewell" philippic with which Wendell Phillips heralded the completion of the great new enterprise. The picture is chiefly interesting now in the fact that it recalls the fierce opposition of Phillips to this particular step of progress and his violent expression of sentiments which long since have been stored amid the dust and dusk of archaic things. He says:

The telegraph tells us that the Indians have begun to tear up the rails-to shoot passengers and conductors on the road. We see great good in this! Haunt that road with such

dangers that none will dare to use it.

Nast drew Phillips as a redskin, knife in hand, lying across the track, with a locomotive under full steam, bearing down upon him. Long before the end of the year the locomotive had passed by and trains across the continent were running on schedule time.

"' of

College Athletics and the International Races were used as pictorial material during this year-also the terrible Black Friday (September 24, 1869) when, through the manipulation of Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr., gold at 11.36 A.M. touched 1621 and closed at 1333, with a net profit to these "operators something more than ten million dollars. It is true they were obliged to get an injunction under a "Tweed Ring" judge to prevent the Gold Exchange from adjusting the many claims against themselves, but these were tactics not unusual to a time when the man with money got such justice as accorded with his own ideas. Nast's picture shows Wall Street blockaded with