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11664   THE STORY OF AN ARTIST'S LIFE

the cause of my good fortune. He was like a father to me, only, however, requiring the complete renunciation of all ideas not in accord with his own.

Upon his return to Philadelphia, he received me into his home, where I lived and worked with him for over a year. It was, however, a most restrained life, as his every whim about art had to be most religiously followed. He was opposed to all academic study, and, whenever I expressed a wish to go to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he always opposed. I have much to thank him for, though our acquaintance came to a rather sudden ending.

Dr. W———— visited the studio. In his natural, straightforward manner, this eminent physician showed in a marked degree his interest in what I was doing, without having, however, previously complimented the work of Mr. X——. I felt most uncomfortable during this visit, as I saw at once that my benefactor was not pleased, and that it would mean several days of morose silence in which all my efforts to restore the status quo would be utterly fruitless. For some reason, I went home that evening, and upon my return the next morning I found all my belongings, with my little canvases tied together, outside his locked studio door. I made several fruitless efforts to see him and find out in what I had sinned, but without avail. I only saw him once again, several years afterward.

In the regular course of events I left school. When my good father, realizing how uncertain was the question of any special talent for art in me, and how uncertain the life of an artist might be, even if I had talent —— which certainly was not yet demonstrated —— put me with a friend to learn the flour business. But belief in myself did not fail, nor my ardor flag. To do any painting now, I had to be up with the dawn to seize the precious minutes of light before seven, when I had to be off to the humbler, though more useful, avocation of selling flour.

This work proved too trying for me, and a severe illness, from which I did not completely recover for many years, decided my family to allow me to be an artist —— if I could.

Now that events had, as it were, decided that I should have a try at being an artist, my father and mother gave me all the encouragement their then limited means would allow. By encouragement I mean not only moral support but a home; so that, for the next fifteen years, I was continuously aided by them to the limit of their ability.

Each time on leaving home, they always said: "Remember, if the worst comes to the worse, you always have a home." I "remembered" as little as possible, but the latch-string was always on the outside.

I was now a lad of eighteen, and my art career was at last really launched. But I was beset by two pressing needs —— the need of money and, by far the more serious, the need of health. It was easy enough to be advised to go to the Adirondacks, but how? That some change was desirable, and even necessary, cannot be doubted, so much so that, when my dear mother, who was used to my more or less delicate health, finally saw me off on my journey, she never expected, as she afterward told me, to see me return alive. But I did get there and returned alive, and I must always believe that it was the good God who opened the way and gave me good friends, thus filling me with confidence in the future which never deserted me in those darkest days.

Those lovely friends of Rainbow Lake —— how I have wished I might be able to repay them for some of their kindnesses. Upon my return to Philadelphia, not a little benefited by this trip and one to Florida, I had the good fortune to make the intimate acquaintance of Mr. C.H. Shearer, an artist prominent in Philadelphia at that time, whose stories of life in Düsseldorf and Munich fired my desire for Europe. But, besides all this, I can never too highly appreciate his personal service to me, and how his kindly nature and gentle disposition helped to reduce the bitterness I (at times) had in my life, and gave me a more hopeful view of my own individual situation; in fact, a visit to him always renewed my courage, not that courage which was necessary for my work but the courage that was necessary to overcome some of the unkind things I had to struggle with. He would remove, at least for a time, that repressing load which I carried, a load which was as trying to me as that carried by poor Pilgrim. I was extremely timid, and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterward caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew