Once Stuart and a friend named Channing swore revenge on a shoemaker who got them into trouble. They sneaked up to his open window on a dark night, and one boy fired a gun while the other squirted blood they had stolen from a butcher onto the cob­bler's bald head. The shoemaker rolled over among his lasts and lap-stones, crying that he was murdered. Hiding in the long grass, swallowing down their mirth, the urchins watched his wife run in and scream for help; they saw the doctor, who had arrived with his beard flying, approach the corpse gravely, wash off the blood, and then stare in amazement. They were so entranced that they did not set off for their homes in time to make a clean get-away; the miracu­lously revived cadaver rushed out to complain, and as the boys were found in bed with their shoes on they were adjudged guilty and roundly beaten with a birch. When Stuart called on their vie-

. tim years later and reminded him of the incident, the old man shook his head. "If you're as good a man as you were a bad boy, you're a devilish clever fellow."

Waterhouse remembered that -Gilbert was "a very capable, self-willed boy, who. perhaps, on that account was indulged in every­thing, being an only son, handsome and forward and habituated at home to have his own way in everything, with little or no control from the easy, good-natured father." Rebellion was in the Stuart heritage. Although there appears to be no foundation for the story that Gilbert's father fought at Culloden, his sympathies were un­doubtedly with Prince Charlie, and most of his American friends were Scottish exiles. He seems to have become a more violent rebel after he had been in Rhode Island for several years; he changed the spelling of his family name from "Stewart" to "Stuart," and added to his son's name, some time after his baptism, the middle name of "Charles," which the lad bore proudly for a while before he discarded it entirely. Certainly the talk around the dinner table did not teach slavish obedience to constituted authority.

Despite his wildness, Gilbert was in his own way preparing him­self for his future career. He played duets with his doting sister, and spent hours listening to the fine organ Bishop Berkeley had given Trinity Church. He could not decide which he liked more, music or the fine arts. There were a few indifferent copies of old masters in Newport for him. to see, and these inspired the drawings he made before he was well in his teens. A rotting stone or a lump of clay served him as a pencil, and fences, barndoors, or the tail­boards of wagons took the place of canvases. His technique was entirely childish, merely the sketching of an outline, but the result was adequately impressive to discourage the emulative efforts of Waterhouse and to impress a distinguished Scottish physician, Dr. William Hunter, who during a professional visit to the Stuart home was amazed to find every flat space scrawled over with drawings. The physician cultivated the acquaintance of the ragged urchin he