and on this I lived my normal life until, some weeks later, a friend of my brother arriving from New York with instructions to find me out and provide for my wants if I had any, supplied me for any probable emergency, including an order for a free passage home on a steamer of which my brother was part owner.  I waited till the spring homesickness made it too irksome to live quietly in Paris, and then finding that the revolution so long waited for had gone by, I went home and to my painting.

In American landscape the element of the picturesque is in a serious deficiency.  What is old is the wild and savage, the backwoods and the wild mountain, with no trace of human presence or association to give it sentiment; what is new is still in the crude and angular state in which the utilities are served, and the comfort of the man and his belongings most considered.  Nothing is less paintable than a New England village; nothing is more monotonous than the woodland mountain of any of the ranges of eastern North America.  The valley of the Mohawk is one of the earliest settled and least unpicturesque sections of the Eastern States, with its old Dutch farmhouses and the winding of the beautiful river; but I had explored it on foot and in every direction for miles around my birthplace, and found nothing that seemed to “make up” save trees and water.  I spent one summer after my return amongst these familiar scenes, but found the few subjects which repaid study too remote from any habitable centre to repay the labor needed to get at them.  I made long foot excursions through the valleys of the Connecticut and Housatonic; but, after my experience in rural England, it was very discouraging to ransack that still unhumanized landscape for pictures.  Everything was too neat and trim, and I remember that one day, when I was on my search for a “bit,” I found a dilapidated barn which tempted me to sit down before it, when the farmwife, guessing my intentions, ran out to beg me “not to take the barn yet; they were going to do it up the next week as good as new, and wouldn’t I wait?”

An accident drove me to pass one of these summers in as complete seclusion from society as I could find, and where I should be able to do nothing but paint.  I had been, two years before, hit in the face by a snow missile, during one of the snowballing saturnalia the New York roughs indulged in after every fall of snow; in this case the missile was a huge block of frozen snow-crust, which flattened my nose on my face and broke the upper maxillary inclosing all the front teeth.  I modeled the nose up on the spot, for it was as plastic as clay, but the broken bone became carious, and, after enduring for two years the fear of having my head eaten off by caries, and having resigned the chance of having it shot off in the revolution, I decided to let my brother operate.  The bone inclosing the front teeth was taken out with the six teeth, and I was sent into retirement for three months at least, while the jaw was getting ready for the work of the dentist.