Thackeray somewhere says that there are no people who so love their work as the artists do, unless it be the actors, who when they are not playing themselves are always at the theater. Even the holiday of the artist is generally devoted to work in a different locality from the home studio; so that it amounts to nothing more than a change of scene without any abatement of business. Gibson himself was one of the worst offenders in this way. He never seemed to rest, while in health, save in and by a change in the place and character of his task. In the pages of “Pastoral Days,” in which he describes--in the chapter upon “Summer”--his visit to “Hometown and Snug-Hamlet,” he confesses his propensity for thus using his vacation. “My wife and I have run away from the city for a month or so. A vacation we call it; but to an artist such a thing is rarely known in its ordinary sense, and often, indeed, it means an increase of labor, rather than a respite. My first week, however, I had consecrated to luxurious idleness. Together we wandered through the old familiar rambles, where as boy and girl in earlier days we had been so oft together.” But the sort of thing which he calls idling comes out a few pages later, when he sums up the doings of that seven days of luxury. “For a week thus we idled, now on the mountain, now in the meadow, while I with my sketch-book and collecting-box either whiled away the hours with my pencil, or left the unfinished work to pursue the tantalizing butterfly or search for unsuspecting caterpillars among the weeds and bushes.” What a busy-body was this, who knew no distinction between work and play, and to whom the sketch-book and collecting-box were the playthings of the idle hour as well as the tools of the most laborious of professions! Well might the companion of that happy summer say in after years, “He seemed never to spend an idle hour.” Another member of his household circle bears similar testimony. “If he were sitting at the table, chatting and joking with us, as likely as not he would have his pencil in his hand, and before we knew it, would dash off on any scrap of paper, some sketch of a beetle, or a bird, or a butterfly, or perhaps a caricature of somebody in the group.” With this nature, steam was always up, and the fires hardly banked at all. No wonder that the machinery literally wore out prematurely.