happened to cast his eyes on a black cat, the favourite of his father;
when, in the tapering fur of her tail, he discovered the means of
supplying what he wanted. He immediately armed himself with his mother's
scissors, and, laying hold of Grimalkin with all due caution, and a proper
attention to her feelings, cut off the fur at the end of her tail, and
with this made his first pencil. But the tail only furnished him with one,
which did not last long, and he soon stood in need of a further supply. He
then had recourse to the animal's back, his depredations upon which were
so frequently repeated, that his father observed the altered appearance of
his favourite, and lamented it as the effect of disease. The Artist, with
suitable marks of contrition, informed him of the true cause; and the old
gentleman was so much amused with his ingenuity, that if he rebuked him,
it was certainly not in anger.

Anecdotes of this kind, trifling as they may seem, have an interest
independent of the insight they afford into the character to which they
relate. It will often appear, upon a careful study of authentic biography,
that the means of giving body and effect to their conceptions, are rarely
withheld from men of genius. If the circumstances of Fortune are
unfavourable, Nature instructs them to draw assistance immediately from
herself, by endowing them with the faculty of perceiving a fitness and
correspondence in things which no force of reasoning, founded on the
experience of others, could enable them to discover. This aptness is,
perhaps, the surest indication of the possession of original talent. There
are minds of a high class to which the world, in the latitude of its
expressions, often ascribes genius, but which possess only a superior
capacity for the application of other men's notions, unconnected with any
unusual portion of the inventive faculty.

In the following year Mr. Pennington, a merchant of Philadelphia, who was