OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 333 



Cincinnati. About this time he lost his father, whereupon he went 

 into Cincinnati to seeli his fortune. 



His first occupation was as keeper of a small reading-room attached 

 to the Broadway and Front Street Hotel. His talent for mechanics 

 now exhibited itself very activelJ^ Much of his leisure he spent in 

 steam-engine factories. His thoughts were busy with the application 

 of steam to carriages on rails. He contrived a small machine to test 

 the practicability of flying. While at the reading-room, and when he 

 was about the age of seventeen, he first saw a piece of sculpture. This 

 was a cast of Houdon's head of Washington. The mechanical execu- 

 tion of the cast was what first acted on his mind, and he was puzzled 

 to understand how it was made. Tiien he was struck with the gran- 

 deur of the head ; and, as he gazed at it, he thought how unattainable 

 was the art of bringing out such a head from a block of marble. 



At the end of a year he left the reading-room for a 2)lace in a " Pro- 

 duce Store." . . . About this period he had opportunity of seeing 

 engravings from some of the antique statues. The close of another 

 year found him in a new situation, that of assistant to the county tax- 

 gatherer, his duty being to ride through the country on horseback, in 

 winter, collecting taxes. This lasted but a few months, when he was 

 employed by Luman Watson, a maker of organs and wooden clocks 

 in Cincinnati. In the workshop of Mr. Watson he found tools and 

 facilities for indul^ino^ his easier fondness for mechanics. His skill soon 

 drew to him the most delicate work in the construction of organs, that 

 of making and ti'imming the stops. ... 



During the two or three years that he was with Mr. Watson, 

 he invented several improvements in clock machinery. . . . When 

 about twenty-one years of age, he became acquainted with a Mr. Eck- 

 stein, a German sculptor, who got him to assist in casting some busts. 

 Now he first witnessed the process of modelling in clay. Before this 

 he had modelled in wax some small bas-relief likenesses. Shortly 

 afterwards he undertook to make in wax, the size of life, the bust of a 

 little girl four years of age, the daughter of John P. Foot, of Cincin- 

 nati. Of this his first bust, made in the garret of the clock-factory, 

 by the side of his bedroom, Thorwaldsen, on seeing a cast of it in his 

 studio in Florence, said that it was the work of a master. 



The mind of Powers was now strongly drawn from the path of 

 mechanism into that of the art of sculpture thus suddenly opened to him. 

 He felt that this was his calling. His second work (modelled out of 

 the same material as the first) was a copy, reduced size, of the head of 

 the Venus dei Medici, from a cast (of the head alone) lent to him. 



