His system of drawing was of his own invention.  Over the picture to be copied he would paste a great sheet of paper, ruling off the same into spaces of about an inch square.  He would cut out one of these squares and Vandover would copy the portion of the picture thus disclosed.  When he had copied the whole picture in this fashion the teacher would go over it himself, retouching it here and there, labouring to obviate the checker-board effect which the process invariably produced.

At other times Vandover copied into his sketch-book, with hard crayons, those lithographed studies on buff paper which are published by the firm in Berlin.  He began with ladders, wheel-barrows and water barrels, working up in course of time to rustic buildings set in a bit of landscape; stone bridges and rural mills, overhung by some sort of linden tree, with ends of broken fences in a corner of the foreground to complete the composition.  From these he went on to bunches of grapes, vases of fruit and at length to more “Ideal heads.”  The climax was reached with a life-sized Head, crowned with honeysuckles and entitled "Flora." He was three weeks upon it.  It was an achievement, a veritable chef-d’oeuvre. Vandover gave it to his father upon Christmas morning, having signed his name to it with a great ornamental flourish.  The Old Gentleman was astounded, the housekeeper was called in and exclaimed over it, raising her hands to Heaven.  Vandover’s father gave him a five-dollar gold-piece, fresh from the mint, had the picture framed in gilt and hung it up in his smoking-room over the clock.

Never for a moment did the Old Gentleman oppose Vandover’s wish to become an artist and it was he himself who first spoke about Paris to the young man.  Vandover was delighted; the Latin Quarter became his dream.  Between the two it was arranged that he should go over as soon as he had finished his course at the High School.  The Old Gentleman was to take him across, returning only when he was well established in some suitable studio.

At length Vandover graduated, and within three weeks of that event was on his way to Europe with his father.  He never got farther than Boston.

At the last moment the Old Gentleman wavered.  Vandover was still very young and would be entirely alone in Paris, ignorant of the language, exposed to every temptation.  Besides this, his education would stop where it was.  Somehow he could not make it seem right to him to cut the young man adrift in this fashion.  On the other hand, the Old Gentleman had a great many old-time friends and business acquaintances in Boston who could be trusted with a nominal supervision of his son for four years.  He had no college education himself, but in some vague way he felt convinced that Vandover would be a better artist for a four years’ course at Harvard.

Vandover took his father’s decision hardly.  He had never thought of being a college-man and nothing in that life appealed to him.  He urged upon his father the loss of time that the course would entail, but his father met this objection by offering to pay for any artistic tuition that would not interfere with the regular college work.