The subscription list of our paper had risen in the first month to above 1200, and the promise for the future seemed brilliant. But, unfortunately, neither of us understood the business part of journalism, or that a paper does not live by its circulation, but by advertisements; and that our advertisements, being a specialty, must be canvassed for vigorously. We did not canvass. Cunning publishers persuaded us that it would be a good thing to take their advertisements for nothing, so as to persuade the others that we had a good advertising list. But the bait never took, and we never got the paying list, and the printer, being interested in our expenditure, never helped us to economize, but played the "Wicked Uncle" to our "Babes in the Wood," and so we wasted our substance. It was, perhaps, fortunate that the funds ran short as they did, for our five thousand dollars could not go far when the subscriptions were all paid in and spent, and the overwork began to tell on me fatally. With the conclusion of the third volume I broke down and had to give up work entirely. When I got out of harness, and had no longer the stimulus of the daily demand and habit of work, the collapse was such that I thought I was dying. I gave my share of the paper to Durand, to do as he pleased with, and went off to North Conway, in the mountains of New Hampshire, to paint one more picture before I died. I chose a brook scene, and Huntington and Hubbard--two of our leading painters--and a Düsseldorf-educated painter, by name Post, sat down with me to paint it. I gave six weeks of hard work to a canvas twelve by eighteen inches, and my competitors cordially admitted my victory. Autumn fell on my work with still something to do to it, and it was never finished to my entire satisfaction, but it was one of the successes of the year at the Academy Exhibition. I stayed late amongst the mountains, only thinking of dying, but nature brought me round. There came, towards the end of the season, a newly married couple from Boston, destined in later years to become a large part of my life,--Dr. and Mrs. Amos Binney. Mrs. Binney was one of the earliest women graduates in medicine in America,--an earnest, true woman, whose ministrations to me in body and mind, in those months of dying hopes, flying leaves, and early snowfalls, were full of healing. I had had a skirmish with Cupid that summer, my first real passion, reciprocated by the subject of it, one of the ardent readers of "The Crayon," an enthusiast in art, and like me in Ruskin--an affair which ended in our double defeat under the merciless veto of the mother of my flame. In that affair Mrs. Binney's tact and knowledge of human nature befriended me profoundly, and were the origin of a cordial intimacy which incidentally had on my subsequent life a great influence. Dr. Binney gave me a commission for two pictures, and invited me to come to his home near Boston to paint them. CHAPTER XII CAMBRIDGE