Of my college course, I retained only what held my sympathies.  I never went in for honors, or occupied myself beyond the required measure with studies which did not per se interest me.  Greek and Latin, but especially physics, the humanities, and literature enlisted all my ambitions, and the little weekly paper which was read at the meetings of our secret society occupied me more than was in due measure perhaps.  I took my degree of course, but not with distinction.  The majority of the family having, prior to my graduation, gathered at or near New York city, my father and mother, having attained their object in remaining in Schenectady, moved to New York, and I, finally liberated for the study of art, gave myself seriously to that end.

CHAPTER V

ART STUDY IN AMERICA

During the time of my preparation for entry to college, a wandering artist had happened to find his way to Schenectady, one of the restless victims of his temperament, to whose unrest fate had given other motives for change than his occupation.  He was an Englishman by the name of John Wilson, a pupil of the brothers Alfred and Edward Chalons, fashionable London miniature painters of the early part of the century.  In years long gone by he had established himself at St. Petersburg as a portrait painter, but, losing his wife and two children by a flood of the Neva, which occurred during his momentary absence in England, he abandoned Russia and went to one of the Western States of America and gave himself up to agriculture.  Here fate found him again, and, after losing another wife and other children, he became a wanderer, interested in everything new and strange.  He had been taken by Pitman’s then new phonography, and his chief occupation at that time was teaching it wherever at any school he could form a class.  He came to Union College, to this end, and had been recommended to my mother for board and lodging, and she gladly availed herself of the opportunity to get for me lessons in drawing in return for his board.  He was a constitutional reformer, a radical as radicalism was then possible, had become an atheist with Robert Dale Owen, indignant at the treatment accorded him by destiny, and was au fond an honest and philanthropic man.  He taught me the simplest rudiments of portrait and landscape in water-color, and of perspective, of which he was master, and, as he failed to find a field for his phonographic mission, I got up a small class in drawing for him, and after our dozen lessons he went his way to new regions and I never heard from him again.  What he taught me I soon lost, except the perspective.