Such passages as these from his own notes, never meant for the public eye, and therefore absolutely conclusive of his sincerity and his real spirit, show how truly he was an observer at first hand. He saw things for himself. There was not a trace of cant in what he had to say about original observation of nature, her wonders and her beauties. The thing he tried to lead others to do he had already done himself. A friend, who is himself a keen observer of nature, wrote of Gibson, at his death: “It was to the habit of observation more than to any endowment that he owed the prosperity of his work,--for his life was a successful one. It enabled him to see clearly, without a teacher, what others find it hard to see at all. He acquired his art practically without instruction, and indeed against opposition, simply taking his pencil and brush into the field and drawing and painting what he saw there. The greatest painters are those who have pursued this method. As a writer and lecturer he showed the advantage of a good scholastic education; yet his themes were those he had chosen and worked out for himself. He was as well-informed on botany, entomology, ornithology, and allied studies as almost any professors of these sciences that could be named; yet it was in the woods and fields rather than in books that he acquired his knowledge.” Gibson’s own words, in the preface to “Sharp Eyes,” confirm his friend’s reflection: “The facts in the following pages are almost entirely drawn from individual experience, largely gathered in boyhood, the apparently random selection being based upon a desire for the greatest variety possible within a limited range of the minor flora and fauna. The dates are apportioned from careful notes verified through a record of many years.” It was this close and personal observation of nature which gave him his rare power in drawing and in composition. He never wished to make his pictures with the models, the objects he was drawing, before him. He studied them in sketches, and mastered every detail of their construction and appearance. This impression, clear-cut, exact, truthful, he carried in his memory. And when he wished to draw it, he worked from memory, refreshed, perhaps, by the memorandum of the sketch; but his picture would be suffused by the glow of his own imagination, idealized [Illustration: “_Wide-Awake Day-Dozers_” (“_Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine_”) _Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers_] by that imperceptible increment which is merely the self, the personal temperament of the artist, lighting up his subject. His memory furnished the anatomy of his subject, and his imagination infused it with life. It was the thing as it was, and something more. Because it was the thing as he saw it. His view of the function of the sketch, and, indeed, his theory of art, condensed into small compass, is well put by himself, in a paragraph from “The Squirrel’s Highway”: