John Coleman Adams

FROM this time forward, Gibson’s success as an artist was assured. And not very long after, he was induced to try his hand at authorship, with results quite as convincing. During the summer of 1878 he spent his vacation, in company with his wife, in the old homes at Newtown and at Washington, Connecticut. Returning to the city in the autumn, and recounting his delightful experiences to Mr. Alden, the editor of “Harper’s Magazine,” the latter insisted that Gibson should put them into an article which he should also illustrate. But even with the practice which he had given himself, in the brief articles he had furnished with many of his drawings, he distrusted his own capacity for literary work. He had no such innate sense of power to write as made him so confident with his pencil. He demurred at the proposition; but Mr. Alden was firm and persistent. “Write it just as you have told it to me,” was his encouraging word. His suggestion was followed, and in the August number of the monthly appeared an affectionate sketch of the old boyhood homes, under the title, which was but a thin disguise, “Hometown and Snug Hamlet.” It proved an instant success. The note struck was genuine and pleasing. The illustrations won the public eye. The canny editor suggested a similar article which should cover the winter phases of country life in the same vein. It was prepared, and appeared in the number for March, 1880; and had a reception as enthusiastic as his former venture. The idea of completing the cycle of the seasons was inevitable, and in June there followed the article on “Spring-Time,” which was pronounced “the most attractive paper” of this number of the magazine, whose “rhythmic prose” was not less highly commended than its illustrations, which another critic called “almost as good as spring itself.” In November the series was rounded out with “An Autumn Pastoral,” which led a reviewer to say “Mr. Gibson is a great artist, and has a great future before him.”

In 1879 he furnished illustrations for E. P. Roe’s “Success with Small Fruits,” which appeared serially in “Scribner’s Magazine,” and which opened the way to an intimate friendship with the author. He made the designs for the poems of the Goodale sisters, “In Berkshire with the Wild-flowers.” But these were mere incidents in the work he was turning off, for half the firms in New York City, and on all sorts of subjects having to do with nature, with animal life, with flowers, and with fruits. In the spring he made a visit to “Roeland” to sketch, and he divided his August vacation between Connecticut and the White Mountains, where he gathered material for a year’s hard work. He busied himself, too, with work in water color, steadily keeping his ideals in mind, and his own art-training in hand.

In the fall of 1880, the four papers which had appeared in “Harper’s Magazine” were collected and published in a sumptuous volume, entitled “Pastoral Days.” It was a book which yesterday would have been called “epoch-making”; to-day it would only be called “record-breaking.” The simple truth about it is that it really touched the high-water mark in the history of nature-illustration by means of wood-engraving. It was everywhere hailed as exhibiting the very best work of its kind ever achieved. The praise which fell to Gibson himself was twofold; for it was an enthusiastic recognition of his talent both as author and as artist. His engravers were applauded for the skill and spirit with which they interpreted his designs. His publishers were commended for the unstinted generosity which had balked at no pains or cost. Even the printer received a curtain-call. For the “Evening Post” with great discrimination insisted that much of the success of the work was due to “another artist, whose name is nowhere given. That artist’s name is David Lewis and he passes his days in the press-room of Harper Brothers, amid the clatter of the printing-machines, engaged in the grimy work of his office.” The “Evening Mail” expressed the unanimous verdict of art circles when it declared: “Writers on art spoke of the days of Bewick with a sort of despair, as though no one like him might ever be expected again. It has been reserved for the United States to show that wood has, for the purposes of engraving, capacities of which Bewick never dreamed, and to produce a school of artists who in treating landscape, at least upon wood, have surpassed everything on the other side of the ocean. In the first rank of these artists stands Mr. William Hamilton Gibson.” The London “Times” in a long notice spoke of his having “the rare gift of feeling for the exquisitely graceful forms of plant life and the fine touch of an expert draughtsman which enable him to select and to draw with a refinement which few artists in this direction have ever shown.” Even the “Saturday Review” in a notice a column and a half in length, confessing its ignorance of Mr. Gibson and his work, declared that his drawings were so full of delicate fancy and feeling, and his writing so skilful and graceful, that it hoped “to hear more of him soon, in either function or both.” In hardly more than two years from the time of his first illustrations Gibson had made his way to the very front rank of the world’s illustrators. His position was truly of his own achieving; and he never fell back from the eminence he had so fairly won. His friend Mr. Charles N. Hurd of the Boston “Transcript” does the situation no more than simple justice in a letter written upon reading the “Saturday Review” article:

“Transcript Office,
“324 Washington Street, cor. Milk Street,
“Boston, May 18, 1881.

“My dear Gibson:

“I congratulate you from the very bottom of my heart on the magnificent article on ‘Pastoral Days’ in the Saturday Review, which, you will see by the papers I send, I have copied into the Transcript. Nothing could have been more gracefully done, and then, in the Saturday Review, one of the very hardest to please of all the British journals! Why, my dear fellow, they never said half so much before of any literary American, living or dead. And there isn’t an ‘if’ in the whole article! I feel as rejoiced about it as if I had some personal share in the glory. If you haven’t a right now to carry your chin high on Broadway then nobody in New York has. I tell you, it’s a great thing to be appreciated; to get praise where you feel that it rests wholly and altogether upon the merits of your work, and has in it no spark of flattery. I can imagine how long the way home seemed that night, and how happy you two were in reading over what the two-thousand-mile-away critic had written. It is worth a good many years’ hard pulling to have one such day.”

One great and decisive reason why he moved on so steadily was his constant ambition to improve upon what he had done. One might easily be misled by the tone of his confidential letters to his mother and others into thinking him overconfident in himself, and a little puffed up by his quick and overwhelming success. But the thought would be absolutely unfair. He was not vain; he was never self-satisfied; he never rested in what he had achieved. After the rousing reception of “Pastoral Days,” he could write to Colonel Gibson in quiet Fryeburg: “I have just finished the last of my White Mountain illustrations—four months’ work—and am beginning a new series of original articles which shall ‘knock spots’ out of all past work. You ask in a previous letter, ‘Can you beat “Pastoral Days”’? Good gracious! The book is so full of shortcomings to me that I wonder at the astonishing appreciation of it. There are a few illustrations in it that I hardly expect to improve very much upon; but as to the average excellence I can ‘see it’ and ‘go a hundred better.’ Perhaps the result will not be as popular. Can’t tell. But I can do better work.” That was the key-note of his life. To do something better next time was the rule of his endeavor. To do something different each time, to turn some new page, follow some new trail, record some new traits of his favorite world, was another characteristic of his purposes. And it kept him from becoming repetitious and tiresome, as he repeatedly piqued curiosity with his novel enterprises in nature-study.

In the late summer of 1880 he spent six weeks in sketching among the White Mountains, whence he went to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for another six weeks of rest. He came home laden with sketches and with photographs, which were at once utilized in making the illustrations for Drake’s “Heart of the White Mountains.” He worked at these with diligence, as we have seen, never a day, apparently, passing without its picture; but it was far into the following spring before the series was finished. The volume was issued in 1881, but before its appearance he was well along with the text and the illustrations for the new articles in the magazine, in the same vein as “Pastoral Days.” In expanded form they were published in the fall of 1882 under the title “Highways and Byways.” It would have seemed improbable that the reception given to his first volume could be repeated. Novelty does so much with Americans to arouse enthusiasm, and they are so quick to compare the later with the former effort, that it might have been predicted that a second volume striking the same note as Gibson’s first success would not be so warmly praised. But the public liked the note, and it pronounced the new book better than the old. The press notices of ’82 and ’83 are in the same strain of unaffected admiration and delight as those of two years before. Perhaps he had most reason to be proud of the approval the new book won from the staid London “Academy” and from Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s “Portfolio.” The former, though a little late in discovering him was ingenious in its sweeping approval. “Fancy to yourself” said the “Academy,” “a Thoreau who has read both Darwin and Ruskin, and who has learned to use the pencil of Birket Foster. To this add the finest workmanship of the American school of wood-engraving, and all the luxury of the richest paper and the clearest type, and you may form some idea of the handsome book now before us. At first it attracted only by the rare delicacy of its drawings, which reproduce with unrivaled truth the exquisite tracery of vegetation, and the ‘ebon and ivory’ of Nature’s shadows. But when we discovered that the artist is also the author, we began to read; and we found ourselves unable to stop till we got to the end.” “We feel that we have here far more than in most American books, a genuine product of the soil.” Mr. Hamerton credits the new book with “a love of nature that is Wordsworthian in its reverence, the close and patient observation of an artist, the peculiar humor of a genial American in the study of men and things.” To such expressions as these, Mr. George William Curtis, voicing the sentiment of his own countrymen, said of him: “Mr. William Hamilton Gibson’s reputation as one of the first of modern artists for wood-engraving, is established and secure.” “It is hard to believe that the blended softness, vigor, and individuality of the art could go further than in the illustrations of this choice volume.”

He had found time during the year for no little study and work in water-color, and even began to essay painting in oils. Despite a long illness of eight months he contributed to several exhibitions and finished a number of new pictures. His goal was always to be a painter. In all the heat of his endeavor and the intoxication of his success he never forgot his ideals, never slackened his march toward the highest art in the most approved forms and mediums.

In May, 1883, his first child was born, and he was soon writing to “Dear Mother Gunn,” in answer to her importunate inquiries, all about the new-comer. “Hamilton Gibson then is his name I understand, though not a gift from me, but simply because I have not the heart to refuse anything to my precious wife just now. So she has christened him as above in spite of much foreboding on my part, as to the probable curtailment of his cognomen among the contemporaneous specimens of his genus in the days which will soon be upon us. I have waited so long for this little angel to come, that I hardly dare realize to the full the happiness which has befallen me lest I awake in bitterness to find it all a tantalizing dream.... But ere long I suppose the reality will be brought home to me more effectually,—a few hours’ perambulating in the ‘wee sma’ hours’ every night for a week or two would dispel all doubts or fears, and place the experience on the basis of solid prosaic reality. At present writing, however, I can truthfully say, as every antecedent pa has done, that he is the best baby alive, quiet, absorbent, and somnolent to a degree of perfection which leaves nothing to be desired. Only last night, after taking his meal, (at least that is what I understand they feed him on) he was placed upon his pillow at ten o’clock and slept like a chrysalis till half-past five this morning. During the day to be sure he is not quiescent for quite so long a period, as then nature seems to ‘abhor the vacuum’ more than ever.”

The year 1883 was devoted to the illustration of E. P. Roe’s “Nature’s Serial Story,” a work into which he entered with heartiness and sympathy. Much time, too, was given to the preparation of the “Memorial” of Mr. Gunn, a volume issued under the direction of an association of his old pupils, commemorative of his striking personality and of the old days in the school at Washington. This book was finely illustrated by the hand of his loving pupil, who also wrote the introduction which was to have been written by Mr. Beecher, whose death occurred while the

work was in progress. The summer vacation was spent, as usual, in hard work, the scene of his labors being in the White Mountains, at Lake George, ending with two weeks in Washington, where he took many photographs and made many sketches for the “Memorial.” There was much painting in water-color for exhibitions here and there, with many sales at good prices. From time to time in 1885 and 1886 he furnished more of the charming articles which the public had learned to look for and to love. “Harper’s Magazine” for October, 1886, contained a surprise and a new delight to his readers in the shape of the famous “Back-Yard Studies,” in which he challenged the belief of the average man, and even astonished himself with the story of the variety of wild-flowers which he found growing in his city yard. A friend had expressed a longing to study wild flowers, but felt that there was no hope of gratifying herself as long as she lived in the city. Gibson advised her to utilize her back-yard, and ventured the guess that he could gather twenty-five different species of plants in his grass-patch, as the harvest of the seed sown by the breezes, the insects, and occasional birds. The next morning he made a count, and was himself surprised to see his “finds” running up to a total of sixty-four different species. The description of his wild garden in these sordid and unromantic surroundings made him new friends and strengthened his old ones in the assurance that he would never fail them in nature-wisdom or originality of vein. For he showed, as he himself maintained, how the back-yard “may become a means of grace, and with its welcome, peaceful symbols of the woodside and the hay-field, the wood-path, pasture, and the farmyard, serve to reawaken and console the latent yearnings of our unfortunate metropolitan exile.” In the fall of 1886 the new volume appeared, to greet a larger public than ever, enthusiastic in its praise and appreciation. One of his reviewers linked his name most happily with some of the favorites of an earlier day. “At the Christmas season of the last generation there was a general anticipation of a new holiday book from Dickens and Thackeray, and the expectation was rewarded year after year. We are coming to cherish the same hope of a Christmas book from William Hamilton Gibson.” With equal fitness this writer assigned him that place which the popular consensus had now begun to allot him, saying, “Mr. Gibson must take his place, as an acute and delightful observer of nature, with Gilbert White, and Henry Thoreau, and John Burroughs.” His niche was secure, his right to it now unquestioned; and all qualified judges saw that he had in himself a quality quite his own, a temperament, a gift, a qualification to sound his own note and deliver a fresh message.

The next months ensuing Gibson spent in working up material for the illustration of a series of papers prepared by Mr. Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, descriptive of life and nature in the South. In March, 1886, he had left New York to join Mr. Warner in New Orleans. They made a tour, two months in length, covering Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, in which he took over five hundred photographs and accumulated much material in notes and sketches. A bright and picturesque letter to his wife gives a fine reminiscence of this delightful trip.

The rest of the year was spent in working up the material thus gathered, and much of the following winter and spring. The summer of 1887 was passed in Washington, Connecticut, where, as a note in his journal tells us, he “spent a very busy season. Made many drawings for two prospective articles on ‘Midnight Rambles’ and ‘Insect Botanists,’ besides many flower-studies and a number of water-colors. Very busy on the ‘Memorial’ volume to Mr. Gunn. Made a large number of drawings for botany.” The last remark refers to a large scheme which now possessed his teeming brain, a plan to write an illustrated botany. He never dropped his purpose,—indeed, abandoned plans were unknown in his life-history,—and before his death he had accumulated over 1500 drawings toward such a work. There have been many such undertakings put forth, successful and valuable. But it is impossible to think without a pang of the wonderful work he would have made out of his accurate knowledge and his matchless art!

The “Memorial” was published in 1887, and he went on with the articles and the water-colors, busy all the time, and always laying out work in advance of his swiftest execution. The spring of 1888 brought the opportunity for a trip to Europe, which included a tour in Great Britain, France, Holland, and Switzerland, with a fortnight in London and another in Paris. His camera and his pencil were both busy, but the new experiences made only an episode in his busy life. He was interested in all the art he saw, and the life of the people appealed to him there, as it did at home. A letter describing his impressions of Holland shows the spirit in which he traveled and the things he elected to see.

“Since last writing you I have enjoyed a week (or more I fear) of rare incident and experience, my days being so full and my evenings so tired that I have failed again in my good intentions as to frequency of letters.

“I hurried your last letter into the mail and am somewhat in doubt whether it reached the Queenstown post in time. Since that writing we (which means a party of Van Ingen, Willis, Roberts, McGrath, Dunthorne and myself) have visited successively Flushing, Rotterdam, The Hague, Dordrecht, Scheveningen, Amsterdam and Brussels. Of course our visit has been brief as the period of time represented has been but four days. The picture galleries have received most of our attention at these places, but at Dordrecht and Scheveningen we found the living pictures unmatched by any in the respective art exhibitions. Dort is a perfect treasure of a place, pictorially considered, and I shall live in hopes of revisiting it in the future more at my leisure and with an eye to ‘material.’ You would have been charmed with the quaintness of this old Dutch village with its Venice-like canals, its queer inhabitants, its hundreds of wind-mills and picturesque old boats. We hired a boat and guide and rowed for hours upon one of these meandering waterways—under arched bridges beneath which we had to stoop; beneath overhanging balconies bright with flowering plants and with an occasional saucy or coquettish face half disclosed between the Venetian blinds at the windows, occasionally with a giggle accompaniment or a handkerchief manoeuvered in a manner which would have done credit to a French or Spanish coquette. The little Dutch ‘yongen’ or Deutscher ‘pups’ saluted us with questionable slang or with stones or what-not, at every private quay or alley-way opening on the canal and altogether our turnout with its noisy exclamatory cargo was a great center of attraction to contiguous neighborhoods whose windows were usually filled with curious spectators mostly on a broad grin of Dutch proportions and typical comeliness, and ’tis true occasionally relieved by a disclosure which our Scotch friend Roberts assured us was ‘bonny’ and which commentary I was pleased to verify, and which moreover was the signal of a chorus of ‘ah’s’ from our bateau that would have done credit to a West Brighton populace at the ‘busting’ of a rocket. Our trip was occasionally varied by a landing at some quaint quay or alley, and a rummaging visit to some musty old bric-a-brac den or junk shop. The streets were of the queerest in architecture and life—queer old women with brass headgear and huge sabots or wooden shoes, and voices like a fog-horn, peddling their green goods, their eggs, milk or whatever, their treasures suspended from yokes, and borne with apparent pleasure. I have bought one of their huge brass milk cans and a few other of their distinguishing paraphernalia for our front parlor over the mantel—(a part of the foregoing was penned late last night but I was so utterly tired that I had to quit in the midst of a sentence which I presume you can detect by examination). I am in the same condition to-night (Friday, May 25th), having spent seven mortal hours on my feet in the ‘Louvre’ to say nothing of the exhaustion which the visit has brought to the other end of my person. Yesterday I was seven hours at the Salon, viewing the miles of pictures and occasionally imagining myself in a harem or in a feminine quarter of a Turkish bath by mistake. I shall go again to-morrow, as I did not see one half of the bathers yesterday and besides there are a few landscapes that I want to get a peep at, if the fleshly charmers will only give a fellow half a chance. 5000 pictures!!! to say nothing of about three acres of statuary!

“I shall spend a week here at Paris and shall then leave for Switzerland, including Chamounix, Interlaken, Rigi, Lucerne, &c., returning after about a week’s trip direct to London there to spend the few days prior to my return. I shall sail with Van Ingen on the ‘Adriatic’ June 13th and shall be most happy to be with my loved ones again. How truly do we measure time by voluminousness of incident. Our Holland trip of 4 days seemed like a month and it seems a half year since I left you in New York. In my hours—say rather moments—of repose I am homesick and my tired feeling adds to the nostalgia. Mr. Van Ingen and McGrath left me in my tracks to-day, and the way I am dispensing my hybrid French to the natives hereabouts is a case of wilful persecution. But I get along better than I would have supposed. I have raked up my old vocabulary and with a reinforcement of grins, gesticulations and shrugs, it is surprising how quickly my victim succumbs. Once in a while it is true I chance upon an ass who don’t catch on, but as a rule I manage to make my patient comprehend my intentions. Everything thus goes well until he starts in, and the average Frenchman can pronounce three words at once with most facile ease and evident delight. I generally wait until he has run through his dictionary from Alfred to Omaha and then inform him that I haven’t understood a word that he has been saying and beg of him to begin again and go slow. When he comprehends that he is to be remunerated by time, and not by the job, and turns out words instead of mush, his lingo is not half so overpowering or so enigmatical. I had the honor to compliment a waiter to-day upon his excellent French when indulged in moderation, bringing a touching parable to my rescue, likening his ‘escargot’ speech to my dish of small isolated boiled potatoes and his ‘chemin du fer’ French to my ‘haricot’ much to his delight and comprehension.”

In 1888 his second son was born, and the happy father writes of the new baby to Colonel Gibson, excusing himself for not having made him a visit: “I have found that we cannot always bend circumstances to our wills, especially when those aforesaid circumstances are materialized in the shape of bills payable, taxes, insurance, houses, wives (I beg pardon, wife), and babies! Yes, babies! For Hamilton Jr. no longer runs this establishment; I enclose the counterfeit presentment of a successor of his who makes us all toe the mark, and bosses the entire household. Is it possible that his fame has not reached your latitude? He has his own way hereabouts, and we imagined that the limits of New England had at least been brought within earshot of his lungs. But he is a darling, if he does take after his daddy. His name is Dana Gibson; (not Charles A.) but old Judge Dana, Richard Dana, his ancestor.”

The year 1889 found him busy with the erection of a new story to his Brooklyn house and his instalment there in a studio which became a favorite theme for newspaper gossip and description. In Washington, too, he acquired another studio for his summer days, in the shape of a little old schoolhouse which was familiar to him in his boyhood. In the autumn of this year he recorded the idea of a “prospective work ‘Eyes to the Blind’ to be prepared with a view to book publication. Made proposition to Harpers who requested me to run the same through the year in ‘Young People,’ one page each, with about 200 drawings.” This, is of course, that favorite work which finally took the name of “Sharp Eyes” and attained such wide popularity. Writing of this new scheme to his friend Colonel Gibson, in Fryeburg, Maine, he opens his mind and heart in his own direct and exuberant way. The letter was written in August, 1890.

“This series will run through the year, and you may like to know how it all came about. Know then that my head gradually got so big with the muchness of learning that I had to rig up a safety valve of some sort, or bust! This would have been an unpleasant denouement for myself and especially tough on the immediate surroundings, human or otherwise, and so I hit upon a plan to put all my goods in the show window and get credit for a big reinforcement behind the counter! Great scheme! eh! (that is if they only won’t try to get a look inside!) My note-books, visible and intangible, have been multiplying from year to year with no available opportunities of keeping pace with them in my accustomed magazine facilities. So I concluded to materialize my material in the form of a dainty book, comprising the more interesting incidents of my journal, arranging the incidents or episodes chronologically—a timely item or two for each week in the year, so that the book might serve as a sort of pictorial reference calendar for the saunterer, affording him at least some few hints of the rich store of wonders which surround him unheeded in every field and by every path. I believe there is real true missionary possibility in such a book as that. My plan completed and a little material duly prepared I broached the matter to the Harpers. They jumped at it at once, and much to my astonishment made me the offer to run it for the entire year of 52 weeks in the ‘Young People,’ an unheard of thing! and something which I had never dreamed of. By this arrangement I not only received much more liberal compensation for the large number of designs than would have been financially possible on the first basis, but in addition realized generously upon the letter press which in the original plan would have been furnished gratis on the customary plan of books paying royalty. In addition to this, inasmuch as the cost of the entire series would of course be charged to the ‘Y. P.’ it gave me a bigger margin both in number and scope of the designs, so that the book as now shaped will be more generously illustrated than as first planned. The series will end with the Xmas number and will then begin to take its book form with numerous fresh additions of tail-pieces and other morceaux, comprising some 300 illustrations. It will not be issued however until the Christmas of 1891 as I have already on the press a volume for the coming season.

“The title of this—my fifth book—is ‘Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine.’ My two midnight articles taking the lead, and followed by my other magazine papers published during the last two years. ‘Bird-Notes,’ (Harper’s), ‘Bird-Cradles,’ (Scribner’s), ‘Prehistoric Botanists,’ (Century), and ‘Wild Garden,’ (Harper’s), this September (now due).

“You shall see the volume as soon as you are likely to desire it, and whether you take any stock in it or not you will, I hope, give me credit of being a well meaning fellow anyhow.

“There! that’s about as big a dose as even your friendship can stand, and so I’ll come around to my autograph and give you a rest—No—not yet either! I wonder if you can’t do me a little favor, just for the sake of old times and in spite of my sins. In addition to all my other work I have been for years preparing a botany on a new plan, and nearly all the bloomin’ things that grow in these parts have been victimized in my enthusiasm.

“There is one plant, perhaps two, which I remember to have seen and gathered on the sand at Lovell’s pond, but which I never identified, which perhaps you could now help me to secure. A little low thing with a few yellow (or pink) blossoms growing on its extremity, and which I saw in profusion the last time I visited the spot with you. I am afraid that the season is too late, or will be when I could receive them from you, but if you can, after about twelve days, or rather about the date of the third of September gather the plants for me, enclose them in a tin spice box, no water, and mail them to me here at Washington, Conn., you will earn my thanks anew. Plants enclosed in tin boxes, with air-tight covers, will keep fresh for days—indeed for many days longer than the same plant would keep in a vase of water.

“And now, my dear friend, au revoir! I sincerely wish that we might meet again if only to clasp hands and exchange greeting, but until another year at least it seems improbable. To-morrow I leave to visit friends in the Adirondacks for two weeks returning here to keep my nose to the grindstone until November when I return to Brooklyn,

“Good bye, regards to all. W. H. G.”

In season for the holidays in 1890 “Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine” was ready; and Gibson had another surprise for the nature-lovers in the chapters on “A Midnight Ramble,” and “Night Witchery.” All he had done was to take his lantern and wander among the grasses and the wild-flowers as they slept, and to tell the story of what he saw and heard. But when he had done with them, his readers all felt, at second-hand, indeed, but keenly enough, as he himself had done, “We have explored a new world—a realm which we can look in the face on the morrow, with an exchange of recognition impossible yesterday.” Edmund Clarence Stedman, suggesting possible choice of material for the “Library of American Literature,” said of this article,” I scarcely believe that you or any one has of late written anything more novel or more poetic than your espionage in the camp of the flowers at midnight.”

All the next year was devoted to work upon “Sharp Eyes,” which appeared in the late autumn of 1891. The intent and scope of the book has been told in the author’s letter to his friend. He puts his purpose succinctly in a paragraph of the introduction, which he quaintly entitled “Through My Spectacles”: “‘Sharp Eyes,’ then, is, in brief, a cordial recommendation and invitation to walk the fields and woods with me and reap the perpetual harvest of a quiet eye, which Nature everywhere bestows; to witness with me the strange revelations of this wild bal masquÉ, to laugh, to admire, to study, to ponder, to philosophize,—between the lines,—to question, and always to rejoice and give thanks.”

Meantime, he was hard at work pushing the studies for his botany. With the sketches he was making for this purpose, he was also making more water-colors, sending them to the various exhibitions, and arranging sales of his own. He was at work on new articles for the “Young People” continuing the unexhausted vein he had opened for these pages. For older readers he was beginning the articles on the cross-fertilization of flowers which foreshadowed the wonderful charts and lectures with which he delighted and informed the whole country. He had begun to lecture too, and he notes in his journal, July 23, 1891, “At Mrs. Van Ingen’s suggestion, I have concluded to give a series of ten familiar talks on Nature, covering botany, entomology, and ornithology, two each week.” This was the beginning of successive series of lectures, covering four years. From these home talks his work in this field grew and multiplied. Soon he was lecturing with these amazing charts before the clubs in New York, before colleges and schools, and finally before popular audiences. In the winter of 1893-94, he made the venture of a series of six lectures in Hardman Hall, New York City, which netted him the handsome sum of eight hundred and fifty dollars, and drew from the veteran manager, Major Pond, an expression of wonder: “The news of your success in Hardman Hall is phenomenal. I can assure you that you are the only man in the United States who could have done such a business.”

Then the calls began to come from all over the country. The same energy, industry, and genius which he had put into his painting and his writing he threw with increasing intensity into this new work. In 1894 he lectured sixty-four times. His success in the new field was instant and complete. It was as thoroughgoing with scientific folk as it was with the children and the plain people. The press had nothing but wonder and commendations. It was an epoch in the popular presentation of scientific fact and research unequaled since the days of Agassiz.

But somehow, in the midst of this new interest and the engagements it brought, he found the time to bring out still another book, as novel and as fascinating as any of its predecessors; and though it dealt with what at first sight seemed an unlovely theme, it was perhaps the most beautiful of his volumes. Promptly on calendar time in 1895 came “Our Edible Mushrooms and Toadstools,” destined to be the forerunner of a fungus-literature growing with every year. Its accuracy satisfied the scientific; its information gratified the popular mind; its illustrations were a joy to the mushroom-hunters. And his originality in treatment gave a hint to the publishers which they have been quick to follow and which they will be sure to follow for many a year to come.

Two more books were to be added to the list of his collected writings, “Eye Spy,” and “My Studio Neighbors,” both volumes in the same vein as “Sharp Eyes,” and made up of his magazine articles. But before they were gathered between covers, he had finished his brief career and had passed on. The last entry in his journal was made on June 12, 1896, to record, as did all his brief notes, nothing but a new item of work,—“Lecture, Holiday House.” He was already in the grip of death. The fierce fires of a relentless industry had burned his forces to a cinder. Through the summer days he languished and drooped, yet would not wholly give over work, nor cease his planning. On the 16th of July, among the hills of Washington, he suddenly died from apoplexy. His overtaxed frame gave way, and, at the early age of forty-six, he slept the long sleep of the body, in the beautiful home he had reared for himself, among those dearest scenes.

Perhaps there is no more fitting close to this hurried sketch of his career than a reference to this beautiful home which he made for himself out of the earnings of his toil, and which seems to have embodied the desires and the noble purposes of his whole life. It was natural, inevitable, than he should choose Washington as the site of this new hearthstone. He located it upon a hillside sloping to the river-valley, with a long and entrancing outlook to distant southern hills. He left the wild-flowers to grow undisturbed upon his lawns, and the clumps of low trees which bore their crimson cones in August gave him the right to call the new estate “The Sumacs.” Here he planted his house, building first of all a story of stones gathered from the fields and old walls round-about. Then a “story-and-a-half,” to use New England phraseology, a tasteful adaptation of old Yankee architecture, with hip roof and low studding. Broad piazzas surrounded it, a great hall welcomed the guest, and inviting rooms with enticing prospects through great windows gave a sense of comfortable space within. To complete the ideal of a home, the great fireplace stood ready for the winter backlog, or bore a screen of boughs in summer and in autumn. How bitter the irony of life, in that as soon as he had reared this shrine for his domestic affections, amid scenes for which he had been yearning all his days, imprisoned in the city, among friends of his boyhood, who loved him as few men are loved—what a strange and baffling lot was his, to be summoned from it all, and from the larger future which seemed opening before his eager heart!