In.his old age West used often to tell how he played hooky from school, pretending to set out each morning but really taking a cir­cuitous route to the attic. While his friends sweated over sums, he combined two of the engravings into one picture. Finally' the schoolmaster sent to ask if Benjamin was ill. Mrs. West found the truant in the attic, but her anger turned to joy when she saw the picture on the canvas. She kissed the little artist with transports of affection, and was so worried for fear he would hurt his painting that she would not let him finish it. This is the canvas West showed everyone who visited his studio when he was old and famous; it revealed, he insisted with sentimental tears in his eyes, "inventive touches of art . . . which with all my subsequent knowledge and experience I have not been able to surpass." Indeed, the picture marked a period in his life, since it convinced his parents and many of his neighbours that he had certainly been chosen by God to be a painter. The boy himself was convinced, and for the remaining seventy-four years of his life he never lost the consciousness of a divine mission.

Mr. Pennington invited West to visit him in Philadelphia. The little boy had no sooner looked .at the harbour and seen his first big boats than he demanded some paints and a canvas. While his host watched in awe, he slapped off "a picturesque view of a river, with vessels on the water and cattle pasturing on the banks." Wordgo         America's Old - Masters

of the prodigy at Pennington's sped quickly through the provincial capital; a rich merchant who had just had his portrait painted com­manded the artist, William Williams, to show it to West. Thus the boy obtained his first view of a painter not himself and a paint­ing not his own.

The transports of delight he went into before Williams's stiff canvas enchanted the painter into inviting the lad to his studio. It was the most exciting place West had ever seen, for not only did it smell of paints, not only were there canvases against the wall, but Williams himself was a character to delight any small boy's heart. He had been captured by Indians. Many years later West described him in a letter. "As he was an excellent actor in taking off character, he often, to amuse me, repeated his adven­tures among the Indians." He told West about "the scenery of the coasts, the birds on them,, in particular the flamingo birds, which he described, when seen at a distance, as appearing like a company of soldiers in red uniforms. He spoke the language of the savages and appeared to have lived among them some years. I often asked how he came to,be with them. He replied that he had gone to sea when young, but was never satisfied with that pursuit; that he had been shipwrecked and thrown into great difficulties; but Providence had preserved him through a variety of dangers." That Williams was an effective story teller, we may be certain, for in his old age he wrote The Journal of Llewellyn Penrose, a vivid tale very like Robinson Crusoe but based on his own experiences among the American Indians.

Williams would turn from tales of adventure to another subject just as exciting; he would talk of art. "He told me that he had imbibed his love of painting when at grammar school at Bristol, where his greatest delight was to go and see an elderly artist who painted heads in oil, as well as small landscapes." After his escape from the savages, he had used what he remembered from those childhood days to set up as a portrait painter, and in provincial

Philadelphia, which had never harboured a good painter or im­ported a first-rate canvas, his skill seemed enough. If he did not make his living entirely from art, but ran what he described in newspaper advertisements as "an evening school for instruction of polite youth in the different branches of drawing, and to sound the hautboy, German and common flutes," that was no criticism of his reputation. As we have seen, many Quakers disapproved of images, even images of their own faces, and, indeed, up to then no painter in all the British Colonies had been able for any length of time to support himself with his brush. The Colonies had been neither rich enough nor culturally ready to patronize art.