58 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



down from about the North Star, the majesty of his train. 

 Then the rolling up of the heavens "like a scroll" I did not 

 know what this process was like, but it seemed vaguely fine 

 and then the burning up of the world. I was always greatly 

 moved while hearing these exhortations, which must indeed 

 have been rather wonderful things, but they made no perma- 

 nent impression upon me. In fact, I regarded them as "nigger 

 talk." 



Until I was twelve years of age I think that I had no sense 

 whatever of natural beauty. I showed no disposition to draw 

 or to model, except with my preposterous fortifications, which, 

 as I recollect them, indicated a considerable ability to shape 

 clay to my mind, and a decided ability for pop-gunning. But 

 as I entered my teens, the sense of natural beauty suddenly, 

 indeed remarkably, awakened. In less than a year I suddenly 

 developed a temporary rage for drawing. Without any lessons 

 or examples, I covered square yards of whitewashed walls with 

 landscapes, in part copies from books, but as I recall with some 

 trace of inventive power in them. People came much to see 

 them, so that, I found myself an infant prodigy. Then, alas, I 

 was sent to a drawing-master in Cincinnati, a German by the 

 name of Welsh. He set me to hard tasks, and the desire evapor- 

 ated, so that in six months I detested it altogether. I have 

 never since been able to draw in a way to give me any pleasure. 

 I am inclined to think that I must have had some sense of 

 pictures at that time, they have always pleased me when the 

 drawing was true, for an incident shows that I was not blind 

 to the expressions of nature. While with Welsh as a very inept 

 pupil, some people came to look at a landscape he was painting. 

 They admired it as a sunset; when they had gone away I asked 

 him, to his great delight, if it were not a sunrise. That I saw the 

 difference, which was plain enough to any seeing lad of fourteen, 

 made him think that I would be an artist; but I was at this 

 stage incapable of the needed labor. 



My newly awakened love for the aspects of nature was shown 



