From his babyhood, almost, the love of art was innate in the boy; and when he was only seven years old, he began to draw upon a slate a scene that particularly pleased him—­a line of geese sailing upon the smooth glassy surface of a neighbouring pond.  He drew them as an ordinary child almost always does draw—­one goose after another, in profile, as though they were in procession, without any attempt at grouping or perspective in any way.  His mother praised the first attempt, saying to him in Welsh, “Indeed, Jack, this is very like the geese;” and Jack, encouraged by her praise, decided immediately to try again.  But not being an ordinary child, he determined this time to do better; he drew the geese one behind the other as one generally sees them in actual nature.  His mother then asked him to draw a horse; and “after gazing long and often upon one,” he says, “I at last ventured to commit him to the slate.”  When he had done so, the good mother was even more delighted.  So, to try his childish art, she asked him to put a rider on the horse’s back.  Jack went out once more, “carefully watched men on horseback,” and then returning, made his sketch accordingly.  In this childish reminiscence one can see already the first workings of that spirit which made Gibson afterwards into the greatest sculptor of all Europe.  He didn’t try even then to draw horse or man by mere guesswork; he went out and studied the subject at first hand.  There are in that single trait two great elements of success in no matter what line of life—­supreme carefulness, and perfect honesty of workmanship.

When Jack was nine years old, his father determined to emigrate to America, and for that purpose went to Liverpool to embark for the United States.  But when he had got as far as the docks, Mrs. Gibson, good soul, frightened at the bigness of the ships (a queer cause of alarm), refused plumply ever to put her foot on one of them.  So her husband, a dutiful man with a full sense of his wife’s government upon him, consented unwillingly to stop in Liverpool, where he settled down to work again as a gardener.  Hitherto, Jack and his brothers had spoken nothing but Welsh; but at Liverpool he was put to school, and soon learned to express himself correctly and easily in English.  Liverpool was a very different place for young Jack Gibson from Conway:  there were no hills and valleys there, to be sure, but there were shops—­such shops! all full of the most beautiful and highly coloured prints and caricatures, after the fashion of the days when George IV. was still Prince Regent.  All his spare time he now gave up to diligently copying the drawings which he saw spread out in tempting array before him in the shop-windows.  Flattening his little nose against the glass panes, he used to look long and patiently at a single figure, till he had got every detail of its execution fixed firmly on his mind’s eye; and then he would go home hastily and sketch it out