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artist was very envious, and in lieu of boughten colors he squeezed the juice of weeds for green and berries for red and with improvised brushes began his career as a painter. One of the happiest days of his boyhood was the occasion when the local market man was induced to buy for him in Wheeling, Virginia, twenty miles away, a box of colors and the necessary brushes. He did not, however, understand the use of brushes and painted with the point, much as with a pen, but soon learned better and early in the sixties had procured oil paints, and several examples of this work of that period in both mediums are preserved.

His mother died when he was ten and he lived a year with his grandparents, John and Mary Heberling, charming old folks, in the village of Georgetown, two and one-half miles away.

The young man was probably of small account on the farm, his two older brothers taking the heavier burdens while he hunted squirrels and rabbits, fished, sketched and went to school. At nineteen [["1865" in pencil above]] he was fortunate enough to be able to attend the McNeely Normal [["l" is corrected from "n"]] at Hopedale, seven miles away, from which institution he graduated in 1867 [["67" crossed out and "70" written above]]. In 1865 he was able to secure a certificate to teach in the common schools, and began in this field as assistant to his cousin, Abram Holmes, in the Red Hill schoolhouse near Cadiz, and later taught in the neighboring schools of Science Hill and Beech Spring.

In 1866 Holmes found the prospect of a teacher's life so unattractive that he decided to take up the study of art if