Yet Nast's prophecy that no prison would be big enough to hold the Boss was to be verified again before the end of the year. Tweed in Ludlow was allowed all sorts of liberties. He had the freedom of the city, and could drive out in the morning with a keeper for his coachman and a warden for his footman. In the evening he could dine at his Fifth Avenue home with a bailiff for his butler.*

It was at Tweed's home (Dec. 4) that he made his escape. The Deputy Sheriff had been invited to dine with him, and Tweed had requested that he might go up-stairs to see his wife. He did not

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE HEAVY BURDEN LAID UPON GRANT

The Centennial year began in Harper's Weekly with one of Nast's happy Christmas pictures-two sleepy children, watching for Santa Claus. The Christmas spirit was always a distinct element in Nast's work and a mighty influence in his household. His own childhood in far-off Bavaria had been measured by the yearly visits of Pelze-Nicol and the Christkind, while the girlhood of the woman who had become his wife was, as we have seen, intimately associated with brilliant and joyous holiday celebrations.

At the door of the now prosperous Nast household Christmas purchases were delivered in relays far into the dusk of Christmas Eve, and these the happy parents took a vast delight in arranging in an original and unconventional manner to make glad the brood of early risers on Christmas Morning. The children remember to-day that there was always a multitude of paper dolls-marvellously big and elaborate paper dolls—a race long since become extinct. And these the artist father-more than half a child himself at the Christmas season-arranged in processions and cavalcades, gay pageants that marched in and about those larger presents which could not be crowded into the row of stockings along the studio mantel. It was a time of splendor and rejoicing-the festive blossoming of the winter

season-and it was a beautiful and sturdy family that made merry Christmas riot in the spacious home.

But fair and fleeting are the joys of Christmas-tide, while the affairs of nations march by in weary multitude.

The year did not open with perfect harmony in the Harper office. The third term spectre had alarmed not only the daily press, but Curtis as well, and the first political cartoon of the year-the " Blighting Effect of the President's Message on Newspaper Row-was as much to be applied to the editor of Harper's Weekly as to those whose faces appeared in the picture. In fact, in the same issue Curtis printed a two column leader in which he referred to the "evasion of the President's letter and Message.'

Commenting on this fact, the New York Times said:

The editor of Harper's Weekly is evidently seriously disturbed by the Third Term talk, and we should judge that Mr. Nast's caricatures have not had much effect upon his mind. Recently an article appeared in the Weekly complaining that the President in his Message had made no reference to the subject, and in the same number there was a drawing by Mr. Nast, ridiculing the editors who took up the cry. The faces of some were shown, but in the background there was one whose back only was revealed to the public, thus giving rise to the horrible suspicion that this unknown personage must have been the editor of Harper's Weekly himself.

Nast never denied that the "unknown personage 99 was intended for Curtis, and no correspondence has been preserved from that period. Perhaps the controversy had passed beyond the mere exchange of letters.

The Post, reprinting from the Chicago Inter Ocean, added a line which would seem to show that the estrangement had become public and a matter for taking sides:

Nast and George William Curtis are rival editors on the same journal, Harper's Weekly. . . Nast hits the nail on the head every time he strikes, because of his great singleness of purpose. Curtis strikes wildly, hurting nobody, not even the

enemy.

Evidently there was a lack of political unity in Franklin Square.

But there were other issues than that of the Presidency. Dudley Field as a "Lion " claiming his "legal (?) share" of the six millions of striped plunder left behind by Tweed, and Field's head as Saturn, encircled by the two Rings he had

THE (D. D.) FIELD OF GOLD, OR THE LION'S LEGAL (?) SHARE lic events.