visitor. He was paid for
some of this work, but much of it he did without any reward, except the
knowledge that he was in a way serving his country. To help support the
little family he used his skill as a painter in making signs for village
taverns and shops, very much as another boy artist named Benjamin West
had done in his youth.

It happened that in 1777 some two thousand British prisoners were
brought to Lancaster and quartered there. Such a large number of the
enemy naturally caused some alarm among the quiet country people. The
officers were lodged at the taverns and at private houses, but the
soldiers themselves lived in rude barracks just outside the town, and
there were so many of them that they made quite a settlement for
themselves. Many of the Hessian troopers had their wives with them, and
these occupied square huts built of mud and sod. The little encampment
had quite a strange appearance, the small mud houses lining primitive
streets and looking like some savage settlement.

Naturally the place had a great charm for the Lancaster boys, and
whenever they were free from school during that time Robert and his
friends were almost sure to be found in the neighborhood of the Hessian
huts, watching these strange men who had come from overseas. Fulton drew
countless pictures of them, some of them caricatures, but many faithful
copies of what he saw. When they were finished these pictures were in
great demand, and some of them were carried as far as Philadelphia, to
show the people there the curious sights of the country near Lancaster.

In spite of his skill in these different lines, Robert was not a very
successful scholar, and his poor schoolteacher, who was a strict Quaker
of Tory principles, found him very hard to put up with at certain times.
If some inventive idea occurred to the boy while he was on his way to
school, he was quite as likely to stop and work it out as not. One time
he came in so very late that the teacher quite lost his patience.
Seizing a rod he told Robert to hold out his hand, and gave him a
caning. "There!" he exclaimed, "I hope that will make you do something."
But the boy folded his arms and answered very quietly, "I came to school
to have something beaten into my brains and not into my knuckles." It
was very hard for the teacher to do much with such a lad, particularly
as the boy was so often really very helpful to him.

Another time when he came to school late, he had been at a