round bay horse with knowing brown eyes. In fact, he was one of the family; all of us except my own mother and father had learned to ride and drive with Old John, as had all the neighbors’ children. It wouldn’t do to take him to Silverton, as he was afraid of covered bridges and bass drums, and they had one of each in that place.
Father didn’t want to leave the farm he had chosen, of all the wilds of Oregon, in 1851. But my stepmother knew it was the only thing to do especially for my art education, which had already begun. I heard Father and Mother in arguments, and heard Father say that the city was no place to teach art; that art was most in evidence in the country, especially such a country, but women always win, so later in the spring my father sold the most beautiful farm I ever saw that we could move to Silverton, a town of three hundred inhabitants; that I might live in the Latin Quarter of that village, and inhale any artistic atmosphere that was going to waste.
Old John was left at Grandma Geer’s with their Old Charley, a horse nearly as old but not half as smart. When the folks moved to
