Read Online The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton by Robert J. Begiebing - Free Book Online Page A

case a spotless linen sleeping gown.
    As I worked I could not help wondering what must have been Effie’s girlish thoughts, sensibilities, and dreams: those hopes instinct with life. The family had gathered her cherished objects about her: a little copy of the American Girl’s Book , her friendship album, and a much-used old copy of The American Toilet (that innocent yoking of the vanities of the dressing table with moral instruction). But it was her childish drawings in pen and crayon which bespoke her love of drawing and coloring. She had chosen familiar objects—birds, efflorescent orchard trees, three colorful butterflies alighting on a gravestone, a white kitten playing with a tuft of Tyrian yarn. Her art-instruction booklets, her scrapbooks full of girlish poems and opinions, aphorisms and prayers, reminded me of my own girlhood.
    Perhaps to relieve my sadness, I recalled my own first book of lessons presented to me by my dear grandmother, and which I believe had belonged to her mother before her—old Peacham’s Graphice or the Most Ancient and Excellent Art of Limning . And I still carried everywhere in my portmanteau, along with my best tin paint box, my old copies of the Progressive Drawing Book and Young Ladies’ Assistant in Drawing and Painting .
    My thoughts also turned to my first teacher in the ornamental arts at Wilmington Seminary for Young Women, Miss Fricke, who taught us to paint from her own work and from nature, in waters and oils. But were it not for my grandmother, some of whose legacy came down to me through my mother and made attendance at the Seminary possible, I never would have met those two artists whose impressions upon me were powerful and who helped me to see what I might innocently dream to be—Mr. Morse, when he was traveling in Strafford County, New Hampshire, and stopped to visit Grandmother, and Mr. Greenwood, whom I later met, also through Grandmother.
    In the poor child lying before me I began to see myself, and all my youthful aspirations flooded back upon me as I worked. Indeed, I suddenly recalled a certain day; I must have been very young, for the image is like a dream to me. I was visiting my grandmother, I believe, at her summer house near Portsmouth. I remember going out of doors, as if stepping into an illuminated hour. I took someone’s hand, perhaps my mother’s or my grandmother’s, and we walked along a hedge-lined drive. Dust, soft yet bright in the sunlight, rose off the ridges smoothed by buggy wheels.
    The light as we neared the harbor grew more intense (it must have been near noonday) and I saw the masts of ships flickering in the June sunlight. It was as if a child had just met the Sun-God, the very flash of His sword rising above the lambent water. It was as if it were the deepest, most secret hour of my childhood, the hour illuminated by hope and penetrated by beauty, the hour opening me to a later vision of myself. “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.” But I believe somehow I knew then, if even just below the level of purposeful awareness, what it was I really wanted to do with my life. It did not matter in such a bright hour of childhood that the moment of aspiration was to be submerged beneath the dozen subsequent years. But it mattered now that my aspiration rose up again in the bloom of womanhood and the rigors of self-dependency.
    As I painted Effie, it was as if I knew that a similar fearless hope had once blossomed in her, for but a moment perhaps. And I believe that as a result of this sympathy, my painting went very much to her mother’s satisfaction. I took longer about it than I normally did in those years, which of course meant that I could not expect payment for the true worth of my labors. Yet for the first time since I began to paint for my living I was unperturbed by any worldly considerations.
    Of little Effie’s memorial portrait I can