“All day, and every day, week in and week out, there is an ever-changing crowd of men, women, and children standing stationary amid the ever-surging tides of Broadway, before the windows of Williams & Stevens, gazing with eager interest upon the statuettes and groups of John Rogers, the sculptor.  These works appeal to a deep popular sentiment.  They are not pretentious displays of gods, goddesses, ideal characters, or stupendous, world-compelling heroes.  They are illustrations of American domestic and especially of American military life—­not of our great generals or our bold admirals, or the men whose praises fill all the newspapers, but of the common soldier of the Union; not of the common soldier, either, in what might be called his high heroic moods and moments, when, with waving sword and flaming eye, he dashes upon the enemy’s works, but of the soldier in the ordinary moments and usual occupations of every-day camp life.  For the last year or more Mr. Rogers has been at work mainly on groups of this latter class and character.  Thus he has given us ’The Returned Volunteer, or How the Fort was Taken,’ being a group of three gathered in a blacksmith’s shop, the characters consisting of the blacksmith himself, standing with his right foot on the anvil block, and his big hammer in his hands, listening eagerly, with his little girl, to a soldier who sits close by on his haunches, narrating ‘how the fort was taken,’ We have also another group of three, ‘The Picket Guard,’ spiritedly sketched, as in eager, close, and nervous search for the enemy; the ‘Sharpshooters,’ another group of three, or rather of two men and a scarecrow, illustrating a curious practice in our army of deceiving the enemy; the ‘Town Pump,’ a scene in which a soldier, uniformed and accoutered, is slaking his thirst and holding blessed converse beside the pump with a pretty girl who has come for a pail of water; the ’Union Refugees,’ a pathetic and noble group, consisting of a stalwart and sad-faced East Tennesseean or Virginian, who accompanied by his wife, who leans her head upon his bosom, and by his little boy, who looks up eagerly into his face, has started off from home with only his gun upon his shoulder and his powder-horn by his side, to escape the tyranny of the rebels; ‘The Camp Fire, or Making Friends with the Cook,’ in which a hungry soldier, seated upon an inverted basket, is reading a newspaper to an ‘intelligent contraband,’ who is stirring the contents of a huge and ebullient pot hung over the fire; ’Wounded to the Rear, or One More Shot,’ in which a soldier is represented as dressing his wounded leg, while his companion, with his left arm in a sling, is trying to load his gun to take another shot at the enemy, at whom he looks defiantly; ’Mail Day,’ which tells its own story of a speculative soldier, seated on a stone and racking his poor brains to find some ideas to transcribe upon the paper which he holds upon his knee, to be sent perchance to her he loves; ‘The Country