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246 the use of judicious speech he not only secured permission from Tustin to paint him as he sat at the rolls, but he pleased him by making the request. Soon after that was to be observed the unprecedented spectacle in the New Rome mills of a painter at work with easel and palette and canvas. The other men joked Tustin about sitting for his portrait; but he was clever enough to see that they regarded it as a distinction. It contributed in a small way to his eminence among them. When he found that Stewart had a great idea of the sufferings, privations, and hardships of iron-workers, he lost no time in confirming the impression. He uttered no personal complaints; his incidental anecdotes, delivered in a calm, matter-of-fact way and showing how pitiable was the life of an iron-worker, filled Stewart with sympathetic indignation. He went to Floyd with a protest, but Floyd was provokingly cool and undisturbed, and either belittled or laughed at Tustin's charges. "Of course it's a hard life," he said. "It can't be anything else. But the men get the very best wages that skilled labor gets anywhere, and we do all we can for their comfort." As to specific cases that Stewart cited, Floyd thought they were very likely misrepresentations. Still he would look into them. Stewart felt that Floyd as an employer of labor might not be much better than many others; he felt after hearing Tustin talk that iron manufacturers were a sinister class.

His vague ideas of doing a great missionary work through his painting took a stronger hold upon his imagination. He saw himself as possibly the Verestchagin of Labor, the painter who should awaken the apathetic public to a consciousness of the dramatic horrors of a wage-earner's life. To be sure, in his portrait of Tustin, a sturdy man sitting comfortably with his hand upon a lever, this purpose was not realized; and he was dissatisfied, not with the picture, but with the impossibility of expressing in painting the true inward misery of such employment. There were opportunities enough, though, to