"Of course not," quickly replied the other. "Make it a private, individual matter. Get some ideas from her, and then go ahead alone." Jared picked up a few elementary facts about colours, canvas, and composition in the art atmosphere of the Seminary, and then set to work by himself. "Something sizable and simple, to start with," he said. Autumn was over the land; nothing seemed more sizable, more simple, more accessible, than the winter squash. "Some of 'em do grapes and peaches," he observed, in reminiscence of the display of the Circuit at the fair, "but round here it's mostly corn and squashes. I guess I'll stick to the facts--that is, to the verities," he amended, in accord with the art jargon whose virus had begun to inoculate the town. He elected the squash. And he never went far beyond it. But the squash sufficed. It led him on to fame (fame of a certain curious kind) and to fortune (at least a fortune far beyond any ever reached by his associates on the farm). III Yes, Jared kept to the squash, and made it famous; and in due course the squash made him famous. He came to be known all over Ringgold County, and even beyond, as the "squash man." He painted this rotund and noble product of the truck-farm in varying aspects and with varying accessories. Sometimes he posed it, gallantly cleft asunder, on the corner of the bran-bin, with its umber and chrome standing out boldly against a background of murky bitumen; and sometimes he placed it on the threshold of the barn door, with a rake or a pitchfork alongside, and other squashes (none too certain in their perspective) looming up from the dusky interior. Jared mastered the squash with all the ease of true genius. He painted industriously throughout the early winter. He had saved two or three of his best models from the fall crop, and they served him for several months. Squashes keep. Their expression alters but slowly. This one fact alone makes them easier to paint than many other things--the human countenance, for example. By the end of January Jared was emboldened to exhibit one of his squashes at a church sociable. "Well, Jared," said the minister's wife, "you _be_ a genius. I don't know that I ever see anything more natural." Other ladies were equally generous in their praise. Jared felt that at last he had found his life-work. Henceforward it was to be onward and upward indeed. The men were more reserved; they did not know what to make of him. But none of them openly called him a fool--a sort of negative praise not without its value. Nor was this forbearance misplaced--as was seen when, along in March, Jared's father ended his fifty unprofitable years of farm routine by dying suddenly and leaving things more or less at loose ends. Farming was not his forte--perhaps it is nobody's. He had never been able to make it pay, and he had gone in seeming willingness to shuffle off the general unsatisfactoriness of it all on to other shoulders.