Mrs. Peale moved back across Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, where she gained a meagre living by sewing dresses, and sent her son Charles to a charity school too lowly to teach Latin; he learned only a smattering of arithmetic and writing. Showing an early pro­pensity for drawing, he made "patterns for the ladies to work after," and eventually copied two prints in oil colours by the ingenious expedient of putting; them under the glass on which he painted. Emboldened by the praise he received, he attempted an original composition of Adam and Eve, but found this almost too difficult. When an uncle died, his aged grandmother insisted that he must preserve a portrait of the corpse. The boy was forced to tiptoe into the still room where the body lay, faintly yellow in the clasp of death. He sat down, lifted his pencil in a shaking hand, and stared into the dead face. The shut lids, blue as skimmed milk, stared back. Scream­ing, Peale abandoned his first attempt at portraiture.

At thirteen, the boy was withdrawn from school and apprenticed to Nathan Waters, a saddler, who soon found him so able that he paid him small sums for special tasks. Peale did not save his earn­ings or contribute them to the family support; he bought first a watch and then a horse. "To possess.such property," he moralized when an old man, "appears to be the too prevailing passion of American youth, for with such they are drawn into other expenses and too often into extravagances, whereas could they be advised to dispose of their first earnings, however small they may be, to some increasing fund, "much benefit would ensue." Peale's watchsoon broke. Since he had to pay five shillings to have it mended, when it broke once more he resolved to mend it himself; however, the instrument, which came apart with most satisfactory ease, would not fit together again. Peale promptly taught himself watch­making, for he was never willing to admit there was anything he could not do.

In his eighteenth year he fell in love with a girl of fifteen. "Miss Rachel [Brewer]," he wrote in his autobiography, [1] "belonged to the class of small women of fair complexion, although her hair was a dark brown colour which hung in curling ringlets over her beau­tiful white neck. Her face was a perfect oval; she had sprightly dark eyes; her nose straight with some few angles such as painters are fond to imitate; her mouth small and most pleasingly formed. In short, she would be called handsome amongst the most beautiful of an assembly of her sex." Although the lady was lovely, the brash young man, who felt he could make as fine saddle-trees as anyone on the Continent, was convinced that he was honouring her with his attentions. When he proposed one evening in the garden, he expected instantaneous and abject acceptance. Miss Brewer, how­ever, sat in a flushed and embarrassed silence. To his amazement, Peale found himself pleading with her. Even when he stretched a point by calling himself unworthy, the pretty girl merely lowered her eyes and remained silent. Finally he decided he had had enough of such coyness; he whipped out his watch and he told her he would "wait one hour for her determination." Delighted to see her grow pale, he leaned back nonchalantly on the garden bench.

Miss Rachel, however, remained silent while the watch ticked a half-hour away. Then Peale began to grow nervous. He strode up and down before her, pointing out what a bright young man he was, what an excellent catch; was he not the heir to a vast British estate? But the lady said nothing, and at last the hour was spent.

"I went immediately to the house and thanked her mother for the

kind entertainment I had received, and said I hoped Miss Rachel

would get a better husband than I could make. That I now must

take my leave of the family for ever." But he left his riding whip

behind.