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 have given the direction to all Gibson's later life: for when the
time came for him to choose a trade, he was not set to till the ground
like his father, but was employed at once on comparatively artistic and
intelligent handicraft.

Jack was fourteen when his father apprenticed him to a firm of cabinet-
makers. For the first year, he worked away contentedly at legs and
mouldings; but as soon as he had learnt the rudiments of the trade he
persuaded his masters to change his indentures, and let him take the
more suitable employment of carving woodwork for ornamental furniture.
He must have been a good workman and a promising boy, one may be sure,
or his masters would never have countenanced such a revolutionary
proceeding on the part of a raw apprentice. Young Gibson was delighted
with his new occupation, and pursued it so eagerly that he carved even
during his leisure hours from plaster casts. But after another year, as
ill-luck or good fortune would have it, he happened to come across a