You and a compositor now have control of the town bill posting. When there are no theater or patent medicine ads to put up you cover the boards with blank newsprint and letter and picture advertisements for the stores. You are sixteen, almost seventeen. A sheet of newsprint is tacked on the printing-office wall and, using marking ink and a brush, you are picturing and lettering a masquerade poster for the roller rink. “Who is this young artist?” The speaker is Frank Bromley, a well-known landscape painter from Chicago. You tell him about your father and that you are going back to Boston to study art. He suggests your stopping off in Chicago to see him. Says he can perhaps help you. You are nearly seventeen and already you have saved more than fifty dollars. By the early fall you have four twenty-dollar gold pieces under your socks in the top till of your trunk. Wages are always paid in gold and silver. You are now ready to start for Chicago. Two weeks later you are on your way. [Illustration] FIRST SOJOURN IN CHICAGO The artist has a studio near the McVickar Theater on Madison Street. It is the typical atelier of the Victorian Eighties: oriental drapes, screens and pottery. Jules Guerin, then an art student and later a contributor to _Century_, _Harper’s_ and _Scribner’s_, is clearing up and tidying for the day. Mr. Bromley takes you to Lyon & Healy. Yes, Mr. Lyon, or maybe it was Mr. Healy, can start you as an apprentice. However, a young man beginning a career should be most careful in making his selection. You have been careful. You want to be an artist. But the business of Lyon & Healy is musical instruments, not art. Next morning you are introduced to Mr. Rand, or Mr. McNally. A Mr. Martin then sends you upstairs, a couple of flights, to Mr. Robinson in the designing and engraving department. Beginners do not receive any pay, but you are put to work at a long table facing a row of windows and with yards and yards of unbleached cotton-cloth stretched on a wire at your back. You are now learning to engrave tints on wood-blocks--under the erroneous impression that designers and illustrators engrave their own blocks. Mr. Bromley has found a room for you at the home of a friend, an art dealer. It is at Vincennes Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. You walk to and from Rand McNally’s, located on Monroe Street, dreaming happily. One morning, after a few weeks of getting nowhere, for you are no master of tint-cutting, it percolates through your skull that inasmuch as wood-engravers never seem to be doing any designing probably designers never do any engraving. A momentous discovery, this, for you have broken into your last twenty-dollar gold piece--as a matter of fact there is just about enough left to pay for taking your trunk to the depot and to buy a second-class ticket back to that printing shop in Northern Michigan.