It had come about as a result of the failure of Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion in Scotland, which had forced Dr. Thomas Moffatt, a learned Boerhaavian physician, to flee to Rhode Island. When he found that his aristocratic manners so annoyed the Quak­ers there that they would not have him in their houses, he decided that his graces were more important to him than his profession; he gave up medicine, and cast round for another means of livelihood. Discovering that all the snuff in the Colonies was imported from Scotland, he determined to set up a snuff mill, and finding that no one in America was capable of building one, he imported a Scottish millwright, Gilbert Stuart the elder, who erected on a tidal river near Narragansett the first "engine for the manufacture of snuff" in New England. In this mill Gilbert Stuart the painter was born on December 3, 1755. He used to amuse himself by telling people he met in England that he first saw the light "six miles from Pot-tawoone and ten miles from Pappasquash and about four miles from Conanicut and not far from the spot where the famous battle with the warlike Pequots was fought." When they asked him what province of India he came from, he was delighted.

The infant's first memories must have been instinct with rush­ing waters and the rumble of revolving weights, for the Stuart fam­ily lived in the upper story of the mill, their floor level with the top of the dam, while the water ran for ever outside the lower windows. The smell of ground tobacco was always in the nostrils of the spoiled child, whose elder sister doted on him, as did his easy­going and impractical parents. Stuart's father was so absent-minded that once, when he and his wife were riding to church on the same horse, he dropped the lady off without noticing. And she was so good-humoured that she was not angry as she sat on the road where she had landed, but rather smiled to think how surprised her hus­band would be when he found her gone. She watched the mill­wright jog gaily'round a bend, there was the silence of heat and birds singing, and then suddenly the clatter of hoofs. Stuart ap­peared at a gallop,.leaning eagerly over his horse's neck. "God's-my-life!" he cried. "Are you hurt?"

The usual stories are told of Gilbert's precocity. When he was five, his daughter relates, he drew on the earth with a stick a perfect likeness of a neighbour. Family tradition also records a holiday ex­cursion to a hanging as an example of his early powers of observa­tion. The shy hangman, who had hidden his identity with a sheet draped from head to ankle, mystified everyone but the babe on Mr. Stuart's shoulder; Gilbert reported who it was. "I know him," the innocent lisped, "by his sues."

Mrs. Stuart decided that so brilliant.an infant must be taught Latin before he was well out of swaddling clothes. Since no one in the neighbourhood knew any Latin, she sent to Newport for a primer and, though she had never seen a word of the strange lan­guage, essayed to teach little Gilbert herself. Of course he did not learn very much.

Gilbert's father, we are told, "was remarkable for his ingenuity and his quiet, inoffensive life"; he lacked the gift for.making money. When Colonial industry proved unable to supply any bot­tles into which his snuff could be packed, he was in despair, until Moffatt suggested the substitution of beeves' bladders. Then gaiety returned to the clanking mill, but not for long; the bladders were not immediately popular. Heart-broken, Stuart sold his share in the mill when Gilbert was six,, and settled in Newport on a scrap of property his wife had inherited. Moffatt then proceeded to make money from the mill. Thus it always was with the well-meaning mechanic. According to his granddaughter, he later invented a. machine for loading ships which made someone else rich and did him no good whatsoever.

Gilbert was to describe his family's Newport house as "a hovel on Bannister's wharf." Like Copley, Stuart spent his boyhood in a tobacco shop on the seafront of a maritime city; but while Copley had trembled behind windowpanes, Stuart was for ever out on the streets leading a gang of urchins in outrageous pranks. The Episco­palian charity school to which he was sent served him only as a reservoir for companions he could lead astray. Schoolbooks were forgotten, while he frolicked with Arthur Browne, later a famous English attorney, and Benjamin Waterhouse, who was to intro­duce vaccination into the United States. The three bright young­sters prowled on the docks, practising oaths and trying to spit like veterans. Or, curled up on bulkheads over the bright water, they would sail in their imaginations to that almost impossible home­land which their parents described to them. They were all, Water-house tells us, "inspired with the same ardent desire to visit Eu­rope."