MY EXPERIENCES AS A WOOD-ENGRAVER.
ONE day during recess instead of going out to play with the other boys I took a piece of chalk and slowly made a drawing of an Oriental head on the blackboard, representing one of Joseph's brethren as he might have looked after the sale of his innocent brother. When the teacher returned and saw the sketch, she was as startled as though the villain had appeared through the blackboard. On being questioned, I confessed, and was reassured when the teacher praised my work, saying that the school would have to get me to make pictures for them.
A school-mate with whom I was intimate had a little book only two inches square, but containing one hundred pages, and on each page was a tiny picture, of animal, bird, boy, or girl. I was seized by an ambition to emulate his success among the boys, but, I fear, more in regard to the number than the quality of the designs. One day the family doctor saw me drawing a bird,—a blackbird, I told him, for it would be black when finished,—and when he said he could not do this himself without tracing on the window-pane, I felt I was quite an artist. The next year at school I made a large landscape, copy of an "Otis" and when the principal told me it was the best in the class, my head was so turned that I went on sketching-expeditions and thought I exhausted nature for miles around. I was then about twelve years old. My ideas ran in grooves: sometimes I would have a book full of artistic pig-pens, next queer old stumps, then tumble-down sheds, fences, and so on.
Afterwards I copied from Otis's book various eyes, noses, mouths, and ears. The servant-girl, being asked what they were, replied, "Leetle pigs!"
I was such a strict adherent to nature that I was once found in tears because the wind blew the trees so hard that I could not draw the landscape accurately.
By this time I thought the art-possibilities of western New York were about exhausted, and I longed to do for the city in the same summary manner. To my great joy, my brother, who kept a large engraving establishment in New York, and who had been pleased with some of my drawings, sent for me.
If I was willing to run errands the first year, my brother's partner would consent to give me a dollar and a half a week. These were liberal terms, for most apprentices paid quite a sum the first year. The city was fairy-land to me. How I liked the hot odor of decaying garbage in Fulton Street! Nothing like that in the country. I made frequent tours of the picture-stores, until the clerks all knew me, and appeared to watch me as though I had been employed by some picture-thief. I set myself up for an art critic; but after all these years I have now learned how little I know of art.
After a series of drawing-lessons, I was presented with a sand-bag, eye-glass and standard, and a set of tools. Then I began to cut lines.
