Sometimes when Francis walked by the side of Jock to and from Sheffield, he would amuse himself by whittling a stick with his pocket-knife. One day he was doing this when a gentleman met him, and examined his work, and then asked what it was. "It is the head of Old Fox," said Francis, whose schoolmaster was named Fox. The man thought the carving was so good that he gave Francis sixpence, and that was the first money he ever earned by his carving. The boy loved drawing pictures, and as the floor of his humble home was of stones, or flags as they are called in English farmhouses, he used to draw pictures upon the floor each Saturday before his mother scrubbed the floor. No doubt his mother often thought the drawings were so good that it was a shame to wash them off. One day a gentleman came to Mr. Chantrey to do some business, and Mrs. Chantrey brought out a large pork pie, upon the top of which were worked cleverly in paste, a sow and several pigs. When the man saw it, he exclaimed: "What a shame that you should have gone to the expense of getting such a pie for me." When Mrs. Chantrey explained that she had made the pie herself, and Francis had modelled the young pigs, when the dough was soft, he was amazed at the boy's ingenuity. Francis' father died when he was twelve years of age, and soon after he was apprenticed to a Mr. Robert Ramsay, who had a small shop in Sheffield where he sold pictures, plaster models, wood carvings, and such things. He was now in the midst of the things he loved, and he took great delight in handling pictures and plaster models. Nothing pleased him better than to model soft clay with his fingers. Sometimes a mould would be taken of a person's face, and young Chantrey thought that he would like to try and take a mould of this kind. He persuaded one of Mr. Ramsay's workmen to lie face upwards upon a table, and then he placed the soft plaster over the man's face and throat, and waited for it to harden. Suddenly the man rolled off the table and madly stripped away the plaster from his throat. Young Chantrey did not know that a man cannot breathe unless his throat can expand, and when this plaster began to harden it was making it impossible for the man to breathe. He was so eager to gain knowledge that he rented a cheap little room, and spent his evenings and holidays drawing and making models. The long hours he spent in that room he never forgot, and in the year before he died he visited that little room, and spoke to friends of the many happy hours he had spent there.