such was the agitation into which she was thrown that the con­sequences nearly proved fatal to herself and her child. Mr. West was much impressed by the occurrence, and his feelings were shared by Peckover, who " took him by the hand, and with emphatic solem­nity said that a child sent into the world under such remarkable circumstances would prove no ordinary man; and he charged him to watch over the boy's character with the utmost degree of paternal solicitude." 

Such are the omens and prodigies with which Gait surrounds the birth of his hero. They sound rather absurd to the taste of the present day, and their bathos is not diminished by the fact that West was really born on Oct. to, 1738, and Dunlap's comment that Peckover did not come to America until five years after that date. 

It was when he was six that the well-known incident occurred of his attempting to draw with red and black ink the portrait of his sister's baby which he had been set to watch. The next year he went to school, but still continued his drawing, until one day a party of friendly Indians, amused at the sketches of birds and flowers which he showed them, taught him to prepare the red and yellow colors with which they painted their ornaments. His mother furnished indigo, the cat's fur was clipped to make brushes, and with these primitive materials he produced some paintings which were seen by a Mr. Pennington, a Philadelphia merchant related to the Wests. They seemed to him remarkable productions for a child of eight, and he promised to send him a box of paints which, on his return home, he did. The boy's delight at the gift was unbounded. He kept it by his bed at night and deserted school in order to give himself up to art. Besides paints and canvas, the box contained six engravings by " Greveling," Gait says. Presumably Gravelot's, whose volumi­nous works, besides the charming illustrations with which his name is naturally connected, contain many copies after the followers of Raphael and the Fontainebleau school. When his mother, learning that he was not at school, finally discovered him in the garret hard at work, he had combined two of these engravings on a single canvas with so much skill that she refused to let him finish it lest he should spoil it, and it was preserved to be exhibited sixty-six years after with the "Christ healing the Sick," the painter declaring to Gait

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