shops! all full of the most beautiful and highly coloured prints
and caricatures, after the fashion of the days when George IV. was
still Prince Regent. All his spare time he now gave up to
diligently copying the drawings which he saw spread out in tempting
array before him in the shop-windows. Flattening his little nose
against the glass panes, he used to look long and patiently at a
single figure, till he had got every detail of its execution fixed
firmly on his mind's eye; and then he would go home hastily and
sketch it out at once while the picture was still quite fresh in
his vivid memory. Afterwards he would return to the shop-window,
and correct his copy by the original till it was completely
finished. No doubt the boy did all this purely for his own
amusement; but at the same time he was quite unconsciously teaching
himself to draw under a very careful and accurate master--himself.
Already, however, he found his paintings had patrons, for he sold
them when finished to the other boys; and once he got as much as
sixpence for a coloured picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps--"the
largest sum," he says brightly in his memoirs long after, "I had
yet received for a work of art."

Opportunities always arise for those who know how to use them.
Little Jack Gibson used to buy his paper and colours at a
stationer's in Liverpool, who one day said to him kindly, "My lad,
you're a constant customer here: I suppose you're a painter."
"Yes, sir," Jack answered, with childish self-complacency, "I do
paint." The stationer, who had himself studied at the Royal
Academy, asked him to bring his pictures on view; and when Jack did
so, his new friend, Mr. Tourmeau, was so much pleased with them
that he lent the boy drawings to copy, and showed him how to draw
for himself from plaster casts. These first amateur lessons must