was painted with the
same attention and with the same ability as the others, and admired as a
picture, after it was finished, as much by some as the others, and more
by many.

"Among these latter were the celebrated Colonel Trumbull and Vanderlyn,
painters of New York.... You cannot but recollect, madam, that when you
yourself with your children visited it, not withstanding you expressed
yourself before them in terms so strong against it and so wounding to my
feelings, yet all your children dissented from you, the youngest saying
it was 'mama,' and the eldest, 'I am sure, mother, it is very like
you.'...

"Your picture, from the day I commenced it, has been the source of one of
my greatest trials, and, if it has taught me in any degree patience and
forbearance, I shall have abundant reason to be thankful for the
affliction."

In the end he consented to take less than had been agreed upon in order
to close the incident.

As a happy contrast to this episode we have the following quotation from
a letter to his wife written on February 17, 1820:--

"Did I tell you in my last that Colonel Alston insisted on giving me
_two hundred dollars_ more than I asked for the picture of little Sally,
and a commission to paint her again full length next season, smaller than
the last and larger than the first portrait, for which I shall receive
four hundred dollars? He intimates also that I am to paint a picture
annually for him. Is not he a strange man? (as people say here). I wish
some more of the great fortunes in this part of the country would be as
strange and encourage other artists who are men of genius and starving
for want of employment."

Morse returned to the North in the spring of 1820 and joined his mother
and his wife and daughter in New Haven, where they had preceded him and
where they were comfortably and agreeably settled, as will appear from
the following sentence in a letter to his good friend and mentor, Henry
Bromfield, of London, dated August, 1820: "You will perceive by the
heading of this letter that I am in New Haven. My father and his family
have left Charlestown, Massachusetts, and are settled in this place. My
own family also, consisting of wife and daughter, are pleasantly settled
in this delightful spot. I have built me a fine painting-room attached to
my house in which I paint my large pictures in the summer, and in the
winter I migrate to Charleston, South Carolina, where I have commissions
suffici