When I got out of harness, and had no longer the stimulus of the daily demand and habit of work, the collapse was such that I thought I was dying.  I gave my share of the paper to Durand, to do as he pleased with, and went off to North Conway, in the mountains of New Hampshire, to paint one more picture before I died.  I chose a brook scene, and Huntington and Hubbard—­two of our leading painters—­and a Duesseldorf-educated painter, by name Post, sat down with me to paint it.  I gave six weeks of hard work to a canvas twelve by eighteen inches, and my competitors cordially admitted my victory.  Autumn fell on my work with still something to do to it, and it was never finished to my entire satisfaction, but it was one of the successes of the year at 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