refused the job, as out
of the line of his work, and I volunteered to take it, stipulating for
some instruction in painting in return. The joint did not answer
when worked out, but the friendship between Sexton and myself lasted
through his life, and a truer example of the artistic nature never
came under my study. All that he knew of painting he got from books,
save for an annual visit to the exhibition of the American Academy at
New York, but his conception of the nature of art was very lofty and
correct, and had his education been in keeping with his natural gifts,
he would have taken a high position as a painter. His was one of the
most pathetic lives I can recall--a fine sensitive nature, full of the
enthusiasms of the outer world, with rare gifts in the embryonic state
and mental powers far above the average, limited in every direction,
in facilities, in education in art and in letters, and having his lot
cast in a community where, except the wife of President Nott, there
was not a single person who was capable of giving him sympathy or
artistic appreciation. Not least in the pathos of his situation was
the simplicity and humility with which he accepted himself, with
his whole nature yearning towards an ideal which he knew to be as
unattainable as the stars, without impatience or bitterness towards
men or fate. If he was not content with what was given him, no one
could see it, and he was so filled with the happiness that nature and
his limited art gave him that he had no room for discontent at the
limitations.

Happy days were those in which my leisure gave me the opportunity to
share this man's walks and make my crude sketches of his favorite
nooks and bends of our beautiful river Mohawk, and listen to his
experiences while he worked. I can see now that it was more nature
than art that evoked my enthusiasms, and that in art I felt mainly the
expression of the love of the beauty of nature. Sexton gave me some
idea of the use of oils, and from that time most of my leisure hours
and my vacant days were given to painting in an otherwise untaught
manner, copying such pictures as I could borrow, or translating
engravings into color--wretched things most certainly, but to me then,
with my crude enthusiasm, productive of greater pleasure than the
better productions of later years.

The three years of my college course had left me little room or
leisure for such studies, and at the end of them I realized that so
far a