"From this point the tide began to turn in my favor. For, soon after, Governor Morgan, on a visit to Italy, learning of my presence there, came to call on me. The fact of my being in Rome, the charm of that city, the idyllic loveliness of the garden in which my studio was smothered, and, to be literal, its nearness to his hotel must have appealed peculiarly to him upon his realizing that here was the son of the interesting man who had made shoes for him in New York. 
"Mars" cameo by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Accordingly, upon his request, I went to see him at the hotel, where he asked me what it would cost to cut in marble the statue of Hiawatha. I have forgotten what the price was; I think in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars. He said he would take the statue if I would execute it for him for that sum. I suppose I danced with glee when I reached my studio after that visit, as here again was one of the happiest days of my life. There seem to be plenty of them as I proceed.
The 'Hiawatha,' the 'Silence,' the busts I had made, and the copies of antiques, were being cut in marble. I was working away completing the portraits of the two daughters of Mr. Gibbs, and I was beginning the studies of statues with which I was to embellish the world. The first represented Mozart, nude, playing the violin. Why under heaven I made him nude is a mystery. The second displayed a Roman slave holding young Augustus on the top of a Pompeian column and crowning him with laurel.
Even with all this, in order to keep his head above the water, Saint-Gaudens was forced to return to his cameos. By this time he had established himself as the most skillful cameo-engraver in Paris or Rome. So, he set up a shop in which his brother and a couple of others worked under his eye. Occasionally also, when in especial need of twenty-five or fifty dollars, he would sit at the lathe himself and finish a brooch and two earrings in twelve hours. Fortunately, this was almost the last occasion in which cameo cutting played a part."
To be continued
(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)
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