Peale had been fascinated not only by the lady; he was also fas­cinated by her technique of teaching the deaf. Paying a call several days later, "I told her that I wished to make a bargain with her, which was to teach her to make porcelain teeth, if she would teach me her art." Afraid of what might follow, Miss Stansbury de­murred. Then her impetuous lover proposed. She replied that she was not well and that she would die soon and that she could never bear leaving the school; he must seek elsewhere. But Peale was not discouraged, for he still had a trump card up his sleeve. He mourned over the gaps in her mouth and offered to make her some false teeth. This kindness she could not refuse, and the many fittings required gave Peale further opportunities to press his suit, but all in vain. When the teeth were finished, he had to return alone to Philadelphia, taking a steamboat to Brunswick.

As the rejected lover sat in the cabin, he confided his difficulties to his diary, but the words that poured from his pen were not depressed; after eighty-six years of looking at the bright side of things, Peale was still am optimist. He would get a wife soon, he wrote, and in the meantime the chase was fun. True, his con­science bothered him a little for fear that his investigations had raised hopes in the hearts of several eligible ladies; but he argued that a man could not be expected to marry a woman until he had found out all about her. When an acquaintance, Mrs. Matlow, tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to visit her sometime in Burlington, he replied: "Oh, yes, Madam, it will give me great pleasure to do so. And very probably you can recommend me to some agreeable companion."

The boat grounded below the landing, but the octogenarian, full of rosy dreams of future married happiness, felt so strong that he slung his trunk over his shoulder and walked. "To add to my difficulties it was dark, and the shore side rough, and to lug my trunk about a half-mile was too severe labour with me, having my cloak and umbrella."

Peale had strained his heart. When he reached Philadelphia, he took to his bed. Some months later, on February 22, 1827, he awoke feeling very weak; dimly he could see his daughter Sybilla sitting beside him. "Sybilla," he whispered, "feel my pulse." She took the emaciated hand, fingered it clumsily for a moment, and said: "Pa, I can't find it."

The aged painter nodded cheerfully. "No," he said, "it is gone. The law makes my will." And he settled back so gently, closed so softly the eyes that had been interested in all God's wonders, that his daughter was confident he slept. But Charles Willson Peale had joined the heroes of the American dream among whom he belonged. We may be sure that Paul Bunyan took him by the hand and Johnny Appleseed called him brother, while George Washington must have smiled as he smiled when he saw the militia captain stuffing his troops with food during the retreat from Princeton. Even Rip van Winkle took off his hat as the old man scorched by on his velocipede.

If the documents were not there, if the paintings did not hang on museum walls, who would believe that Peale had really lived? We would not expect to find him in the sober writings of historians; he seems rather a more intellectual version of some story told around the fire in a lumber camp or on a prairie, when the narrator's mind, heated with rum or applejack, calls again from the heavens the reverberating echoes of American legend. Peale was the early American spirit come to life, the spirit of the simple folk. He was