We may be certain that the men who bounced young Benjamin on their knees were not hidebound by tradition. Indeed, in this radical community the Quaker prejudice against art probably helped the infant painter, since it prevented his elders from seeing images to compare with his. His childish drawings of animals and flowers seemed to them miracles of skill. While West was still a small boy, his reputation travelled for miles through the country­side.

Soon little Benjamin learned to put his talent to practical use. When the shades of the schoolhouse closed around the growing boy, he proved unable to do arithmetic. Regularly he failed in his sums, and as regularly felt a switch laid onto his buttocks. How­ever, he finally induced a classmate named Williamson to do his exercises in return for having a textbook decorated with wild ani-⁴ mals. This illuminated primer, West's first commission, was in ex­istence until a few years ago.

The historical fact that families of Indians continued to live in Delaware County until long after West's childhood, rearing their wigwams on the banks of creeks and walking at peace among the Quaker farmers, lends credence to a story the painter told his biographer. One afternoon, he said, he was amusing himself after school by drawing in the forest when he heard a rustling behind him and saw a party of Indians approaching in single file. The child was not afraid; indeed, the Indians may have been old friends, since small boys have a tendency to hang around disreputable adults who can be induced to tell tall stories. In any case, the boy showed the savages his drawings. They admired stolidly, as In­dians do, and then asked why he did not give that robin a red breast. On learning that the child had no colours to play with, the savages squatted down at once and told him how to mix the red and yellow earths with which they painted their faces. West ran home delighted, and when he told his mother, she added blue by giving him a piece of indigo. Thus- he had the three primary col­ours.

But how was he to put them on paper? His thumb was too thick an instrument and his pen too thin. Told of this difficulty, a par­ticularly erudite Friend explained that brushes could be made by fastening camel's hair in a quill. That was exciting news, but what was he to do for a camel? As he meditated glumly, his father's black cat padded into the room. Snatching up his mother's scissors, Ben­jamin cut off the fur at the end of the tail. This made only one brush, however, and the indefatigable painter wore that out in a few hours. Soon Mr. West was heard to wonder what had happened to Kitty to make her hair come off in large patches; she must have the mange. Gait, who never missed a moral lesson, tells how West confessed and was forgiven.

• In 1744 John West, probably because his tavern was not as suc­cessful as he had hoped, moved a few miles farther north, renting an inn at Newtown Square. Here the lad painted away, while his parents and their new Quaker neighbours admired. When Ben­jamin was eight, a Philadelphia Friend named Pennington came to stay at the inn. Amused by the childish pictures hung up with such care, after his return to the city he sent Benjamin a box of