work was in progress. The summer vacation was spent, as usual, in hard work, the scene of his labors being in the White Mountains, at Lake George, ending with two weeks in Washington, where he took many photographs and made many sketches for the “Memorial.” There was much painting in water-color for exhibitions here and there, with many sales at good prices. From time to time in 1885 and 1886 he furnished more of the charming articles which the public had learned to look for and to love. “Harper’s Magazine” for October, 1886, contained a surprise and a new delight to his readers in the shape of the famous “Back-Yard Studies,” in which he challenged the belief of the average man, and even astonished himself with the story of the variety of wild-flowers which he found growing in his city yard. A friend had expressed a longing to study wild flowers, but felt that there was no hope of gratifying herself as long as she lived in the city. Gibson advised her to utilize her back-yard, and ventured the guess that he could gather twenty-five different species of plants in his grass-patch, as the harvest of the seed sown by the breezes, the insects, and occasional birds. The next morning he made a count, and was himself surprised to see his “finds” running up to a total of sixty-four different species. The description of his wild garden in these sordid and unromantic surroundings made him new friends and strengthened his old ones in the assurance that he would never fail them in nature-wisdom or originality of vein. For he showed, as he himself maintained, how the back-yard “may become a means of grace, and with its welcome, peaceful symbols of the woodside and the hay-field, the wood-path, pasture, and the farmyard, serve to reawaken and console the latent yearnings of our unfortunate metropolitan exile.” In the fall of 1886 the new volume appeared, to greet a larger public than ever, enthusiastic in its praise and appreciation. One of his reviewers linked his name most happily with some of the favorites of an earlier day. “At the Christmas season of the last generation there was a general anticipation of a new holiday book from Dickens and Thackeray, and the expectation was rewarded year after year. We are coming to cherish the same hope of a Christmas book from William Hamilton Gibson.” With equal fitness this writer assigned him that place which the popular consensus had now begun to allot him, saying, “Mr. Gibson must take his place, as an acute and delightful observer of nature, with Gilbert White, and Henry Thoreau, and John Burroughs.” His niche was secure, his right to it now unquestioned; and all qualified judges saw that he had in himself a quality quite his own, a temperament, a gift, a qualification to sound his own note and deliver a fresh message.