Two years of Pomfret and he was entered as a cadet at the West Point Military Academy. He remained there three years, and was dropped in 1854 because deficient in chemistry. Besides, he could not remember dates, and at cavalry drill he had difficulty in keeping on his horse. These seem slight reasons for dropping his name from the rolls, but the West Point requirements in those days, as now, were rather rigorous. He appealed to Washington for reinstatement but was denied. In its place a job was offered him in the Coast Survey. He accepted and drew on government maps for some months, resigning in 1855. The same year he went to Paris to study art and entered the studio of Gleyre, one of the leading semiclassic painters of the time. Whistler’s boyhood and youth suggest little out of the ordinary except that he was better born, better educated, and had better advantages than the average aspiring youth. In art he had left only the usual record of desultory drawings. Professor Weir at West Point had given him lessons, but nothing remarkable resulted therefrom. Some of the sketches of his West Point days are preserved, and while they are not astonishing, they are nevertheless moderately indicative of the coming master. Two drawings called “The Valentine” and “Sam Weller and Mary” have the same small delicate line and an attempt at tone by shadings and hatchings that characterize his etchings and lithographs of later date. But Whistler’s career does not begin for us until he reached Paris in 1855--the year before La Farge’s arrival. There are conflicting stories about what he did or did not do under Gleyre. He must have learned something of drawing and construction besides such small studio devices as arranging colors on the palette, preparing the canvas, using ivory-black as a base of tone--a method which he retained all his life. In actual handling of the brush he seems to have gotten something from his associates, Fantin-Latour and Degas, who were then following Courbet. Evidently he did not care for the routine of the _atelier_. Drouet, the sculptor, who was one of his intimates, did not think that he worked much but was well disposed toward jokes, pranks, and a good time. By way of interlude during his two years with Gleyre he went with a companion on a trip through Alsace and did some etchings, known as the French set. In 1857 he made a trip to England and studied pictures at the Manchester Exhibition. Returned to Paris, he remained there until 1859, living in the Latin Quarter, copying pictures at the Louvre, and doing original work of his own. His first notable picture, “At the Piano,” was sent to the Salon of 1859 and rejected, though two of his etchings were accepted. Sent to the Royal Academy the same year, the picture and the etchings were well received and praised.