Chester Harding, reared on the New York frontier, a typical back-woodsman, by turns a peddler, a tavern-keeper, and house-painter, and a failure at all of them, got so deeply in debt that he ran away to Pittsburgh to escape his creditors, and there, to his amazement, one day saw an itinerant painter painting a portrait. Before that, he had secured work of some sort, and his wife had joined him. Filled with admiration for the artist's work, he procured a board and some paint, and sat down to paint a portrait of his wife. He actually did produce a likeness, and, delighted at the result, practiced a while longer, and then, proceeding to Paris, Kentucky--perhaps through some association of the name with the great art centre of Europe--boldly announced himself as a portrait painter, and got about a hundred people to pay him twenty-five dollars apiece to paint them. He spent some time at Cincinnati, and got as far west as St. Louis, where he journeyed nearly a hundred miles to find Daniel Boone living in his log cabin on his Missouri land, and painted the portrait of that old pioneer which is reproduced in "Men of Action." Boone was at that time ninety years of age, and Harding found him living almost alone, roasting a piece of venison on the end of his ramrod, as had been his custom all his life. One of the most surprising things in the history of American art is the facility with which men of all trades turned to portrait painting, apparently as a last resort, and managed to make a living at it. During the first half of the last century, the country seems to have been overrun with wandering portrait painters, whose only equipment for the art was some paint and a bundle of brushes. They had, for the most part, no training, and that anyone, in a time when money was scarce and hardly earned, should have paid it out for the wretched daubs these men produced is a great mystery. But they did pay it out, and, as we have seen, Harding earned no less than twenty-five hundred dollars in a comparatively short time. With such of this money as he had been able to save, he went to Philadelphia and spent two months in study there; then he returned to his old home, and astonished his neighbors by paying his debts. He astonished them still more when they found he was making money by painting portraits, for which he now charged forty dollars each, and his aged grandfather felt obliged to protest. "Chester," he said, having called him aside so that none could overhear, "I want to speak to you about your present mode of life. I think it no better than swindling to charge forty dollars for one of those effigies. Now I want you to give up this way of living and settle down on a farm and become a respectable man."