dead.

When an artist can not succeed, he begins to teach art--that is, he shows
others how. Raymond Bonheur put his four children out among kinsmen in
four different places, and became drawing-master in a private school. Rosa
Bonheur was ten years old: a pug-nosed, square-faced little girl in a
linsey-woolsey dress, wooden shoon, with a yellow braid hanging down her
back tied with a shoestring. She could draw--all children can draw--and
the first things children draw are animals.

Her father had taught her a little and laughed at her foolish little lions
and tigers, all duly labeled.

When twelve years of age the good people with whom she lived said she must
learn dressmaking. She should be an artist of the needle. But after some
months she rebelled and, making her way across the city to where her
father was, demanded that he should teach her drawing. Raymond Bonheur
hadn't much will--this controversy proved that--the child mastered, and
the father, who really was an accomplished draftsman, began giving daily
lessons to the girl. Soon they worked together in the Louvre, copying
pictures.

It was a queer thing to teach a girl art--there were no women artists
then. People laughed to see a little girl with yellow braid mixing paints
and helping her father in the Louvre; others said it wasn't right.

"Let's cut off the braid, and I'll wear boy's clothes and be a boy," said
funny little Rosalie.

Next day, Raymond Bonheur had a close-cropped boy in loose trousers and
blue blouse to help him.

The pictures they copied began to sell. Buyers said the work was strong
and true. Prosperity came that way, and Raymond Bonheur got his four
children together and rented three rooms in a house at One Hundred
Fifty-seven Faubourg Saint Honore.

Rosalie saw that her father had always tried to please the public; she
would please no one but herself. He had tried many forms; she would stick
to one. She would paint animals and nothing else.

When eighteen years old, she painted a picture of rabbits, for the Salon.
The next year she tried again. She made the acquaintance of an honest old
farmer at Villiers and went to live in his household. She painted
pictures of all the livestock he possessed, from rabbits to a Norman
stallion. One of the pictures she then made was that of a favorite Holland
cow. A collector came down from Paris and offered three hundred francs for
the picture.

"Merciful Jesus!" said the pious farmer; "say noth