IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS 75

between ten and eleven. But I never saw any boy’s work in my life showing so little original faculty, or grasp by memory. I could literally draw nothing, not a cat, not a mouse, not a boat, not a bush, “out of my head,” and there was, luckily, at present no idea on the part either of parents or preceptor, of teaching me to draw out of other people’s heads.

Nevertheless, Mary, at her day school, was getting drawing lessons with the other girls. Her report of the pleasantness and zeal of the master, and the frank and somewhat unusual execution of the drawings he gave her to copy, interested my father, and he was still more pleased by Mary’s copying, for a proof of industry while he was away on his winter’s journey-copying, in pencil so as to produce the effect of a vigorous engraving, the little water-colour by Prout of a wayside cottage, which was the foundation of our future water-colour collection, being then our only possession in that kind-of other kind, two miniatures on ivory completed our gallery.

83. I perceive, in thinking over the good work of that patient black and white study, that Mary could have drawn, if she had been well taught and kindly encouraged. But her power of patient copying did not serve her in drawing from nature, and when, that same summer, I between ten and eleven (1829), we went to stay at Matlock in Derbyshire, all that she proved able to accomplish was an outline of Caxton’s New Bath Hotel, in which our efforts in the direction of art, for that year, ended.

But, in the glittering white broken spar, specked with galena, by which the walks of the hotel garden were made bright, and in the shops of the pretty village, and in many a happy walk among its cliffs, I pursued my mineralogical studies on fluor, calcite, and the ores of lead, with indescribable rapture when I was allowed to go into a cave. My father and mother showed far more kindness than I knew, in yielding to my subterranean passion; for my mother could not bear dirty places, and my father had a

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