When he called for it the next day, he expected Miss Rachel to apologize, but she did not even come down to see him. Furious, he sprang on his horse and galloped to the house of another young lady whom he knew but slightly. "Finding the lady at home, I asked to speak in private to her, and began to declare my intentions of seek­ing a lady that might make me a wife. I asked her if she had any engagements on her hands. The lady was confused, and seemed at a loss to know how to answer such a question, but she faintly in­timated that she had. I replied that I was sorry for it, but I would give her no further trouble, and very politely took my leave of her. This courtship did not take more than one hour from the begin­ning to the end of it, and," Peale could not resist adding, "it has been said that this lady was afterwards unhappily married."

Peale mooned about his master's shop, and sometimes hit his thumb with his hammer. Finally he met Miss Rachel on the street. "I lamented the cause of absence from her mother's house." The pretty girl tossed her head and replied that his precipitate manner had not deserved an answer, and that if he took her silence as a refusal, that was his fault. Returned eagerness gleamed in Peale's eyes, but before he agreed to call that night, he made a bargain with her; he made her promise that she would give him her answer. As he sat again with his charmer in the familiar garden from which he had been banished, Peale's manner was almost humble. Smiling inwardly perhaps, but with an outwardly grave face that did not offend her proud lover. Miss Rachel agreed to become his wife.

As a reward for special diligence, Peale was released.from his ap­prenticeship when he was twenty, a few months before his inden­ture ran out. "Perhaps," he wrote, "it is not possible for-those who have never been in such a situation to fully feel the sweet, the de­lightful sensations attending a release from a bondage of seven years and eight months, a release from labour from sunrise to sunset, and from the beginning of candlelight to nine o'clock during half of each year; under control of a master and confined to the same walls and the same dull repetition of the same dull labours. . . . How great is the joy, how supreme the delight of freedom! It is like water to the thirsty, like food to the hungry, or like rest to the wearied traveller."

Jubilantly, Peale borrowed an extravagant sum from his master to set up independently as a saddler, and married Rachel Brewer. In his newfound magnificence, he boasted all day long about the great British estate he was to inherit, until someone, irritated be­yond endurance, wrote him a letter purporting to come from a British army officer. He must hurry across the ocean instantly, the letter warned, lest he be defrauded of a vast inheritance that was his due. Peale lacked the fare to England, but in great excitement made out affidavits to prove his identity and legitimacy, which he sent to a lawyer in London. Since he would soon be rich, he scorned economy. No other artisan and his wife in all Annapolis were so proud and gay.

The instant Peale became twenty-one, his former master de­manded payment of the large sums which the young man had re­garded as an indefinite loan. At once in financial difficulties, Peale did not work harder at the saddling that had long bored him; with amazing versatility and ingenuity, he branched out into other trades, although often he had to make his own instruments and teach himself how to use them. He began with upholstery. Since buying the necessary supplies merely increased his debts, he took a chaisemaker into partnership, but that gentleman promptly ab­sconded with their common funds. After having himself made a carriage with the materials left behind, Peale added watch- and clockmaking to his specialties. From that it was only a step to

silversmithing, and he boasts: "I once cast a set of stirrups in brass."

Peale was willing to turn his hand to anything that would make . him money, so long as it was something new. When he went to Nor-., folk, Virginia, to buy some leather, he.met, he wrote in his auto­biography, "a brother of Mr. Joshua Frazier's who had some fond­ness for painting and had painted several landscapes and one por­trait with which he had decorated his rooms. They were miserably done; had they been better, perhaps they would not have led me to the idea of attempting anything in that way."

Remembering how he had traced prints when he was.a child, Peale decided he could do better than Frazier. On his return to Annapolis, he obtained canvases, paints, and brushes from a coach-maker and painted a landscape which, he remembers, "was much praised by my companions." Scowling into a mirror, he then exe­cuted a portrait of himself with a clock he had just taken to pieces before him. Although his friends were impressed by this work too, he eventually mislaid it. His son Rembrandt insists that thirty-seven years later he saw some colours gleaming through the dirt of a canvas that was\used to tie up a pound or two of whiting. "I washed it off," he wrote, "and my father recognized his first at? tempt, well drawn and well coloured."