of
bread in her pocket, and generally forget to eat it. After working
all day, she would come home tired, often drenched with rain, and her
shoes covered with mud.

She took other means to study animals. In the outskirts of Paris were
great _abattoirs_, or slaughter-pens. Though the girl tenderly loved
animals, and shrank from the sight of suffering, she forced herself to
see the killing, that she might know how to depict the death agony
on canvas. Though obliged to mingle more or less with drovers and
butchers, no indignity was ever offered her. As she sat on a bundle of
hay, with her colors about her, they would crowd around to look at
the pictures, and regard her with honest pride. The world soon
learns whether a girl is in earnest about her work, and treats her
accordingly.

The Bonheur family had moved to the sixth story of a tenement house
in the Rue Rumfort, now the Rue Malesherbes. The sons, Auguste and
Isadore, had both become artists; the former a painter, the latter a
sculptor. Even little Juliette was learning to paint. Rosa was working
hard all day at her easel, and at night was illustrating books, or
molding little groups of animals for the figure-dealers. All the
family were happy despite their poverty, because they had congenial
work.

On the roof, Rosa improvised a sort of garden, with honeysuckles,
sweet-peas, and nasturtiums, and here they kept a sheep, with long,
silky wool, for a model. Very often Isadore would take him on his back
and carry him down the six flights of stairs,--the day of elevators
had not dawned,--and after he had enjoyed grazing, would bring him
back to his garden home. It was a docile creature, and much loved by
the whole family. For Rosa's birds, the brothers constructed a net,
which they hung outside the window, and then opened the cage into it.

At nineteen Rosa was to test the world, and see what the critics would
say. She sent to the Fine Arts Exhibition two pictures, "Goats and
Sheep" and "Two Rabbits." The public was pleased, and the press gave
kind notices. The next year "Animals in a Pasture," a "Cow lying in a
Meadow," and a "Horse for sale," attracted still more attention. Two
years later she exhibited twelve pictures, some from her father and
brother being hung on either side of hers, the first time they had
been admitted. More and more the critics praised, and the pathway of
the Bonheur family grew less thorny.

Then, in 1849, when she was twenty-seven, came t