Above the signature is, or was some ten years since, a small decorative panel showing a strip of yellow sand, a black dot of a boat, and a line of blue sky, so true in tone and sure in composition that when Mr. Crocker first passed that way and stood astounded before it--as did Robinson Crusoe over Friday's footprint--he was so overjoyed to find another artist besides himself in the town, that he turned into the shop, and finding only a young mechanic at work, said:
"Go to New York, young man, and study, you have a career before you."
The old landscape-painter was a sure prophet; little pen-and-ink sketches bearing the initials of this same sign-painter now sell for more than their weight in gold, while his larger canvases on the walls of our museums and galleries hold their place beside the work of the marine-painters of our own and other times and will for many a day to come.
This exile from Kennedy Square had been the first man to shake Oliver's hand the night he entered the cast-room. Social distinctions had no place in this atmosphere; it was the fellow who in his work came closest to the curve of the shoulder or to the poise of the head who proved, in the eyes of his fellow-students, his possession of an ancestry: but the ancestry was one that skipped over the Mayflower and went straight back to the great Michael and Rembrandt.
"I'm Jack Bedford, the sign-painter," he said, heartily. "You and I come from the same town," and as they grasped each other's hands a new friendship was added to Oliver's rapidly increasing list.
Oliver's seat was next to Fred, with Jack Bedford on his right. He had asked to join this group not only because he wanted to be near his two friends but because he wanted still more to be near the Milo.
He had himself selected a certain angle of the head because he had worked from that same point of sight with Mr. Crocker, and it had delighted him beyond measure when the professor allowed him to place his stool so that he could almost duplicate his earlier drawing. His ambition was to get into the life-class, and the quickest road, he knew, lay through a good cast drawing. Every night for a week, therefore, he had followed the wonderful lines of the Milo's beautiful body, which seemed to grow with warmth under the flare of the overhanging gas-jets.
These favored life students occupied the room next to the casts. Mother Mulligan, in full regalia of apron and broom, often sat there as a model. Oliver had recognized her portrait at once; so can anyone else who looks over the earlier studies of half the painters of the time.
"Oh, it's you, is it--" Mrs. Mulligan herself had cried when she met Oliver in the hall, "the young gentleman that saved Miss Margaret's dog? She'll be here next week herself--she's gone home for awhile up into the mountains, where her old father and mother live. I told her many times about ye, and she'll be that pleased to meet ye, now that you're WAN of us."
It was delightful to hear her accent the "wan."
Mother Mulligan always thought the institution rested on her broad shoulders, and that the students were part of her family.
The old woman could also have told Oliver of Margaret's arrival at the school, and of the impression which she, the first and only girl student, made on the night she took her place before an easel. But of the reason of her coming Mrs. Mulligan could have told nothing, nor why Margaret had been willing to exchange the comforts of a home among the New Hampshire hills for the narrow confines of a third-story back room, with Mrs. Mulligan as house-keeper and chaperon.
Fred knew all the details, of course, and how it had all come about. How a cousin of Margaret's who lived on a farm near her father's had one day, years before, left his plough standing in the furrow and apprenticed himself to a granite-cutter in the next town. How later on he had graduated in gravestones, and then in bas-reliefs, and finally had won a medal in Rome for a figure of "Hope," which was to mark the grave of a millionnaire at home.
How when the statue was finished, ready to be set up, this cousin had come to Brookfield, wearing a square-cut beard, straight-out mustaches with needle-points, and funny shoes with square toes. How the girl had been disposed to laugh at him until he had told her stories of the wonderful cities beyond the sea and of his life among the painters and sculptors; then she showed him her own drawings, searching his face anxiously with her big eyes. How he had been so astounded and charmed by their delicacy and truth, that he had pleaded with her father--an obstinate old Puritan--to send her to New York to study, which the old man refused point-blank to do, only giving his consent at the last when her brother John, who had been graduated from Dartmouth and knew something of the outside world, had joined his voice to that of her mother and her own.
How when she at last entered the class-room of the Academy the students had looked askance at her; the usual talk had ceased, and for a time there had been an uncomfortable restraint everywhere, until the men found her laughing quietly at their whispered jokes about her. After that the "red-headed girl in blue gingham," as she was called, had become, by virtue of that spirit of camaraderie which a common pursuit develops, "one of us" in spirit as well as in occupation.
