Perhaps there is no more fitting close to this hurried sketch of his career than a reference to this beautiful home which he made for himself out of the earnings of his toil, and which seems to have embodied the desires and the noble purposes of his whole life. It was natural, inevitable, than he should choose Washington as the site of this new hearthstone. He located it upon a hillside sloping to the river-valley, with a long and entrancing outlook to distant southern hills. He left the wild-flowers to grow undisturbed upon his lawns, and the clumps of low trees which bore their crimson cones in August gave him the right to call the new estate “The Sumacs.” Here he planted his house, building first of all a story of stones gathered from the fields and old walls round-about. Then a “story-and-a-half,” to use New England phraseology, a tasteful adaptation of old Yankee architecture, with hip roof and low studding. Broad piazzas surrounded it, a great hall welcomed the guest, and inviting rooms with enticing prospects through great windows gave a sense of comfortable space within. To complete the ideal of a home, the great fireplace stood ready for the winter backlog, or bore a screen of boughs in summer and in autumn. How bitter the irony of life, in that as soon as he had reared this shrine for his domestic affections, amid scenes for which he had been yearning all his days, imprisoned in the city, among friends of his boyhood, who loved him as few men are loved--what a strange and baffling lot was his, to be summoned from it all, and from the larger future which seemed opening before his eager heart! [Illustration: _The Sumacs_] CHAPTER IV WITH PENCIL AND BRUSH It is hard to say whether Gibson was first a naturalist and afterwards an artist, or first an artist and afterwards a naturalist. Art was his mode of expression; but his knowledge of nature furnished the material of what he would express. Art was his speech, but nature was his theme. In point of time there was no difference in the development of these two sides of his nature. His boyhood passion seemed to divide between studying nature and drawing pictures. He wrote of himself in “Pastoral Days” (p. 66): “Insect-hunting had always been a passion with me. Large collections of moths and butterflies had many times accumulated under my hands, only to meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the love for the insect and the passion for the pencil strove hard for the ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my sketch-book with studies of insect life.”