"I wish I had time to describe for you the school-house with its surroundings, for the place is to us now a picture in the early American life of a great man--all such historic pictures are invaluable. Catch one glimpse of it: a neat stone school-house on a sloping green; with grey old white oaks growing around and rows of stripling poplars and scattered cedar trees. A road ran near and not far away was a little yellow-faced cottage where he lived. The yard was walled off from the road and there were seats within and rosebushes and plum trees and hop-vines. On one side hung a signboard waving before a little roadside inn; on the other a blacksmith shop with its hammering. Not far off stood the edge of the great forest 'resounding with the songs of warblers.' In the depths of it was a favourite spot--a secret retreat for him in Nature. "There then you see him: no longer a youth but still young; every road he had tried closed to him in America as in Scotland: not a doctor, not a minister, not a good poet, not a good flutist, not a good violinist, not a copper-plate engraver, not a willing weaver, not a willing peddler, not a willing school-teacher--none of these. No idea yet in him that he could ever be anything. A homeless self-exile, playing at lonely twilights on flute and violin the loved airs of rejected Scotland. "Now it happened that near his school was a botanical garden owned by an American naturalist. The American, seeing the stranger cast down by his aimless life, offered him his portfolio of drawings and suggested that he try to draw a landscape, draw the human figure. The Scotch weaver, the American school-teacher, tried and disastrously failed. As a final chance the American suggested that he try to draw a bird. He did try: he drew a bird. He drew again. He drew again and again. He kept on drawing. Nothing could keep him from drawing. And there at last the miracle of power and genius, so long restless in him and driving him aimlessly from one wrong thing to another wrong thing, disclosed itself as dwelling within his eyes and hands. His drawings were so true to life, that there could be no doubt: the road lay straight before him and ran clear through coming time toward eternal fame. "All the experience which he had been unconsciously storing as a peddler in Scotland now came back to him as guiding knowledge. The marvelous memory of his eye furnished its discipline: from early boyhood through sheer love he had unconsciously been studying birds in nature, and thus during all these wretched years had been laying up as a youth the foundation of his life-work as a man.