erica. The valley of the
Mohawk is one of the earliest settled and least unpicturesque sections
of the Eastern States, with its old Dutch farmhouses and the winding
of the beautiful river; but I had explored it on foot and in every
direction for miles around my birthplace, and found nothing that
seemed to "make up" save trees and water. I spent one summer after my
return amongst these familiar scenes, but found the few subjects which
repaid study too remote from any habitable centre to repay the labor
needed to get at them. I made long foot excursions through the valleys
of the Connecticut and Housatonic; but, after my experience in rural
England, it was very discouraging to ransack that still unhumanized
landscape for pictures. Everything was too neat and trim, and I
remember that one day, when I was on my search for a "bit," I found
a dilapidated barn which tempted me to sit down before it, when the
farmwife, guessing my intentions, ran out to beg me "not to take the
barn yet; they were going to do it up the next week as good as new,
and wouldn't I wait?"

An accident drove me to pass one of these summers in as complete
seclusion from society as I could find, and where I should be able to
do nothing but paint. I had been, two years before, hit in the face by
a snow missile, during one of the snowballing saturnalia the New York
roughs indulged in after every fall of snow; in this case the missile
was a huge block of frozen snow-crust, which flattened my nose on my
face and broke the upper maxillary inclosing all the front teeth. I
modeled the nose up on the spot, for it was as plastic as clay, but
the broken bone became carious, and, after enduring for two years the
fear of having my head eaten off by caries, and having resigned the
chance of having it shot off in the revolution, I decided to let my
brother operate. The bone inclosing the front teeth was taken out with
the six teeth, and I was sent into retirement for three months at
least, while the jaw was getting ready for the work of the dentist.

I had seen, when last in England, the picture by Millais, "The
Proscribed Royalist," which gave me a suggestion of the treatment of
a landscape which should be mainly foreground, such as I particularly
delighted in. Hoping to find a woodland subject which admitted of
this treatment, I went to pass the summer on the farm of an old uncle
(where I had caught my first trout), knowing it to be heavily wooded.
Of course when