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 Mar., 1913 ALLAN BROOKS--AN APPRECIATION 71 was given carte blanche with these brushes, although his father would give him no advice, and he painted nothing but birds--painted day and night, until ev- ery species represented in his collection was reproduced in color. In 887, namely when Allan was eighteen, the family, then consisting of the father, two older brothers, and a younger sister, and himself, removed to British Columbia and settled on a farm in Chilliwack Valley, on the lower Fraser River. This little-explored region was quite to our subject's liking, and while he hated farm work, he found in bird-study a constant relief which made fai-m-life endur- able. In 89 o the Brooks'home With the outbuildings, including a rude museum, was destroyed by fire. The young man succeeded in saving most of his bird- skins--would have saved them all but for a murderous fusillade of exploding cartridges---but he lost ten years' notes and all his paintings. Disheartened by this disaster and yet enthralled by the charm of the wilds, the ornithologist practically abandoned both his museum work and his painting, and gave himself over to hunting, trapping and exploring. For ten years he threshed out the mountainous section of southern British Columbia, until he knew it as a man knows his door-yard.' As a result he recorded stuff from the general vicinity of Chilliwack which we didn't realize existed in the Northwest --had the skins to back it too--Bobolink, McCown Longspur, Harris Sparrow, Black-headed Jay, Stilt Sandpiper, ' Gray Gyrfalcon, and a score of others the mere mention of which thrills the nerves of a working ornithologist. To prose- cute his studies and to carry on his field work after the family had again aban- doned the farm and gone East, Mr. Brooks began to sacrifice his accumulated collections and the cream of his annual take as well. The career of a collecting naturalist is seldom a prosperous one, and Brooks's was no exception. It is difficult for a distant patron to understand the hardships of the man in the field or to realize the acuteness of his necessities. Collecting for pay, indeed, is endurable only in the case of one who has a consuming passion. for the wilds, and who is able to turn to final account the intimate knowledge cf nature afforded by those hard-earned opportunities. Brooks had at least this to show for the ten years spent in enriching others, even though he himself would have prized more than most the choice things he had to pass on. I-le had, of course, himself to thank for habitual under-estimation of his own worth and op- portunities. But it was hardly his fault when a wealthy English collector of in- ternational reputation offered him a bonus of sixpence for every new species of flea he should discover, and surrender. The savant made good too, and sent our supposed humble provincial a cheque for a shilling for two such new specie< Brooks has it framed as "Exhibit A" of plutocratic munificence. Toward the close of this decade Brooks resumed the brush in answer to re- peate d demands for detailed studies of "soft prts" of birds and big game. This led to more pretentious efforts, and sketches from life were submitted to one and another of those eastern customers who had bought skins or ggs of him. Hs black-and-white work began to appear in Recreation, Forest and Stream, St. Nicholas and other magazines, and he came to look upon sketching as a subsid- iary means to a livelihood. When "The Birds of Washington" was proposed in the fall of i9o4, I wrote up to neighbor Brooks, whom I had never met, thinking to get a contribution of notes. In replying he enclosed a black-and-white, a sketch of a Black-throated Gray Warbler, asking me if I could use anything like that. My blood leaped at sight of it, for I had not known that anything of that quality was being produced