himself studied at the Royal Academy, asked him to bring his pictures
on view; and when Jack did so, his new friend, Mr. Tourmeau, was so
much pleased with them that he lent the boy drawings to copy, and
showed him how to draw for himself from plaster casts. These first
amateur lessons must have given the direction to all Gibson's later
life: for when the time came for him to choose a trade, he was not set
to till the ground like his father, but was employed at once on
comparatively artistic and intelligent handicraft.

Jack was fourteen when his father apprenticed him to a firm of
cabinet-makers. For the first year, he worked away contentedly at legs
and mouldings; but as soon as he had learnt the rudiments of the trade
he persuaded his masters to change his indentures, and let him take the
more suitable employment of carving woodwork for ornamental furniture.
He must have been a good workman and a promising boy, one may be sure,
or his masters would never have countenanced such a revolutionary
proceeding on the part of a raw apprentice. Young Gibson was delighted
with his new occupation, and pursued it so eagerly that he carved even
during his leisure hours from plaster casts. But after another year,
as ill-luck or good fortune would have it, he happened to come across a
London marble-cutter, who had come down to Liverpool to carve flowers
in marble for a local firm. The boy was enchanted with his freer and
more artistic work; when the marble-cutter took him over a big yard,
and showed him the process of modelling and cutting, he began to feel a
deep contempt for his own stiff and lifeless occupation of woodcarving.
Inspired with the desire to learn this higher craft, he bought some
clay, took it home, and moulded it for himself after all the casts he
could lay his hands on. Mr. Francis, the proprietor of the marble
works, had a German workman in his employ of the name of Luge, who used
to model small figures, chiefly, no doubt, for monumental purposes.
Young Gibson borrowed a head of Bacchus that Luge had composed, and
made a copy of it himself in clay. Mr. Francis was well pleased with
this early attempt, and also with a clever head of Mercury in marble,
which Gibson carved in his spare moments.

The more the lad saw of clay and marble, the greater grew his distaste
for mere woodwork. At last, he determined to ask Mr. Francis to buy
out his indentures from the cabinet-makers, and let him finish his
apprenti