good-natured Düsseldorfian willingly lent brushes and bits of millboard
upon which John proceeded to make the most lurid confections. The forms
of things were, of course, an obstacle to him, as they are to everybody.
'I never could drore,' he told me, 'and I never wanted to drore like that
painter chap. Why he'd fill a big canvas with little trees and rocks and
ponds till it all seemed no bigger than a Noah's ark show. I used to ask
him, "Why don't you wait till evening when you can't see so much to
drore?"' To such criticism the painter naturally paid no attention, while
John devoted himself to sunsets and the tube of crimson lake. From
babyhood he had loved the purple hour, and his results, while without
form and void, were apparently not wholly unpleasing, for his master paid
him the compliment of using one or two such sketches as backgrounds,
adding merely the requisite hills, houses, fences, and cows. These
collaborations were mentioned not unworthily beside the sunsets of
Kensett and Cropsey next winter at the Academy. From that summer John was
for better or worse a painter.

"His first local success was, curiously enough, an historical
composition, in which the village hose company, almost swallowed up by
the smoke, held in check a conflagration of Vesuvian magnitude. The few
visible figures and Smith's turning-mill, which had heroically been saved
in part from the flames, were jotted in from photographs. Happily this
work, for which the Alert Hose Company subscribed no less than
twenty-five dollars, providing also a fifty-dollar frame, fell under the
appreciative eye of the insurance adjuster who visited the very ruins
depicted. Recognising immediately an uncommonly available form of
artistic talent, this gentleman procured John a commission as painter in
ordinary to the Vulcan, with orders to come at once to town at excellent
wages. By his twentieth year, then, John was established in an attic
chamber near the North River with a public that, barring change in the