the Academy Exhibition. I stayed late amongst the mountains, only
thinking of dying, but nature brought me round. There came, towards
the end of the season, a newly married couple from Boston, destined
in later years to become a large part of my life,--Dr. and Mrs.
Amos Binney. Mrs. Binney was one of the earliest women graduates in
medicine in America,--an earnest, true woman, whose ministrations to
me in body and mind, in those months of dying hopes, flying leaves,
and early snowfalls, were full of healing. I had had a skirmish with
Cupid that summer, my first real passion, reciprocated by the subject
of it, one of the ardent readers of "The Crayon," an enthusiast in
art, and like me in Ruskin--an affair which ended in our double defeat
under the merciless veto of the mother of my flame. In that affair
Mrs. Binney's tact and knowledge of human nature befriended me
profoundly, and were the origin of a cordial intimacy which
incidentally had on my subsequent life a great influence. Dr. Binney
gave me a commission for two pictures, and invited me to come to his
home near Boston to paint them.

CHAPTER XII

CAMBRIDGE

I gave up my studio in New York and went to Boston, and, my
commissions executed, moved from there to Cambridge, where I made my
home, returning thenceforward to the Adirondacks in the late summer
and autumn of every year while I remained in America. The following
springtime I spent making studies in that classic neighborhood,
especially in a favorite haunt of Lowell's,--the "Waverley Oaks,"--a
curious group of large white oaks, which had taken root some hundreds
of years ago on the foot of a moraine of one of the offsets of the
great glacier which, countless thousands of years ago, had covered New
England. They were beautiful trees and greatly beloved by Lowell, for
whom I painted the principal group, with Beaver Brook, another of his
favorite studies, and he lying by its bank in the foreground, a little
full-length portrait, not the length of my finger. I painted also a
similar portrait of Longfellow, under the most beautiful of the oaks,
on an eight-by-ten-inch canvas. It was a good portrait, but Lowell
deterred me from finishing it as I wished, saying that if I touched it
again I should destroy the likeness. I am half inclined to think that
his insistence was mainly intended to abbreviate the martyrdom
of Longfellow, whom I conducted every day to the Oaks, to insure
pre-Raphaelite fidelity, m