Viewing page 42 of 64

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

6

branches. Besides being able to make and mend every sort of farm implement, he was skilled in the manufacture of jewelry and silver-ware, such as spoons, ear-rings, etc., and an excellent repairer of watches and clocks.

In addition to these valuable and useful gifts, he acted as a moral counsellor to his neighbors. Temperate in opinion, cool in judgment, and inflexibly honest, they could confidently consult him in all their difficulties. Though a plan country farmer, he was not indifferent to literature, judging by his books, for he was a subscriber to Gordon's "History of the United States" (a work of great interest, which every young American of our time should read), and he possessed the large folio "Brown's Bible," an important publication of that day. His shop was a resort of prominent, well-to-do men of the vicinity, where they discussed political and social questions, serving as an intellectual exchange or club (one of the seeds, in fact, of the Century), suiting the simple primitive habits of those colonial days. At the breaking out of Revolution our artist's father enlisted in the army, but the authorities discovering his skill in mechanics, sent him back to make bayonets, the troops being sadly deficient in arms. The family possess one of those bayonets, unstained, I 



7

believe, with the blood of British grenadiers. In one of General Washington's reconnoitring rides on the mountain behind the Durand farm, his spy-glass was broken, and it was given to the famer to mend.

These incidents give an idea of the social and intellectual atmosphere which influenced the boyhood of Durand. The ornamental chasing which the father must have occasionally practised in finishing silver-ware and adorning watch-cases, we may well believe, fostered in the boy a fondness for artistic forms. The youth's education was only that of a village school at the beginning of this century. The grammar he used is a small volume, bound in sheep, with the inscription, "Bought July 8, I8II," its cover tastefully decorated by himself with pen scroll-work surrounding his monogram —his mind more engrossed, perhaps, with this outside illumination than with the nouns and verbs within.

Before he left his father's house, he studied an ingenious machine to render the abstract rules of grammar visible to the eye, by certain parts and movements demonstrating the meaning of the various parts of speech. At the old homestead, some ruins of this machine—wheels, mirrors, weights, etc.—remained for many years, an incomprehensible mystery to the present generation.