But although Holbein had got his foot on the ladder of fame in this year's beginning of his connection with Froben, he was as yet very thankful to accept any commission, however humble. And as a human document there is a touch of peculiar, almost pathetic interest about the Schoolmaster's Signboard preserved by Bonifacius Amerbach, and now with his collection in the Basel Museum (Plate 3). It is a simple thing, with no pretension to a place among "works of art"--this bit of flotsam from 1516, when it was painted. Originally the two views, the Infant Class and the Adult Class, were on opposite sides of the sign; but they have been carefully split apart so as to be seen side by side. In the one is the quaint but usual Dame's School of the period; in the other the public is informed how the adults of Basel may retrieve the lack of such early opportunities. The inscription above each sets forth how whosoever wishes to do so can be taught to read and write correctly, and be furnished with all the essentials of a decent education at a very moderate cost; "children on the usual terms." And there is a delightful clause to say that "if anyone is too dull-witted to learn at all, no payment will be accepted, be it Burger or Apprentice, Wife or Maid." Somehow, looking at the young fellow at the right of the table, in the Adult Class, sitting facing the anxious schoolmaster, with his own brow all furrowed by the effort to follow him and his mouth doggedly set to succeed,--while the late, low sun of a summer afternoon streams in through the leaded window,--one muses on the chance that so may the young painter from Augsburg, now but nineteen, himself have sat upon this very bench and leaned across this very table, in a like determination to widen out his small store of book-learning. He could have had little opportunity to do so in the ever-shifting, bailiff-haunted home of his boyhood. And somewhere he certainly learned to write quite as well as even the average gentleman of his day; witness the notes on his drawings. Illustration: PLATE 3 SCHOOLMASTER'S SIGNBOARD _Oils. Basel Museum_ Somewhere, too, and no later than these first Basel years, he acquired the power to read and appreciate even the niceties of Latin, though he probably could not have done more than make these out to his own satisfaction. All his work of illustration is too original, too spontaneous, too full of flashes of subtle personal sympathy with the text, to have emanated from an interpreter, or been dictated by another mind than his own. And this very Signboard may have paid for lessons which he could not otherwise afford. For if there is any force in circumstantial evidence it is certain that Holbein not only wrote, but read and pondered and thought for himself in these years when he doubtless had many more hours of leisure than he desired, from a financial standpoint.