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118 Rhodora [JuLy 
4 Charles Faxon taught himself to draw, using as his model the studies 
of landscape and of trees published by J. D. Harding, an English 
artist, in his Lessons on Trees and other books which in their time 
were influential in increasing the love of drawing. By the time he was 
fifteen years old Charles Faxon was able to make excellent copies in 
color of some of Audubon’s birds, and during the summers made ; 
successful pencil and water color sketches of the scenery of northern 
New England. 
| What Faxon learned from schools was in the Jamaica Plain public 
i schools and the Lawrence Scientific School at Cambridge, from which 
he was graduated as a civil engineer in 1867. At Cambridge he was 
noted for skill in mechanical drawing. Later he became deeply inter- 
ested in English literature and taught himself to read nearly all the 
modern European languages. After graduating from the Lawrence 
Scientific School he was a clerk for a short time in the firm of leather 
merchants established by his father and conducted by two of his older 
brothers. During this time he made a journey among the mountains of 
western North Carolina, and in 1876 he passed six months in Europe, 
visiting Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. 
Faxon lived always in Jamaica Plain and did not care to travel 
except in western and northern New England where he spent a few 
weeks every spring and autumn, his last journey to northern New 
Hampshire having been in the autumn before he died. Berkshire 
County, Massachusetts, was a favorite field of the Faxons and they 
knew its flora well, as they did that of the Green Mountains of Vermont 
and of all northern New Hampshire. Outside of New England Faxon 
traveled little and never crossed the continent. In the spring of 1883 
he passed a few weeks at Mobile, making sketches of some of the 
southern trees for The Silva, and in the winter and spring of 1885 he 
visited with me several of the West Indian islands in the hope of 
obtaining material of some of the West Indian trees which grow also 
in southern Florida. On this journey we returned by the way of New 
Orleans and went as far west as San Antonio, Texas. In April of 
the next year he visited with me the Florida Keys on one of the 
steamers of the United States Lighthouse Service and at this time 
made a large number of drawings. This was the last of Faxon’s 
journeys beyond New England. 
From 1879 to 1884 Faxon was an instructor of botany in the Bussey 
Institution of Harvard College. He was a Fellow of the American 
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