Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/23



CHAPTER I

A NEW ART BEGUN

As a boy I lived on a farm near Clarendon, Orleans County, N. Y., and for some reason, about the time I was thirteen, I got interested in birds. I was out of place on the farm for I was much more interested in taxidermy than in farming. As a matter of fact, by the time I was sixteen I announced to the world that I was a taxidermist. I had borrowed a book which had originally cost a dollar, and from that book I learned taxidermy up to a point where I felt justified in having business cards printed stating that I did artistic taxidermy in all its branches. I even went so far as to take several lessons in painting from a lady who taught art in Clarendon, in order that I might paint realistic backgrounds behind the birds that I mounted. So far as I know, that was the first experiment of painted backgrounds used for mounted birds or animals. I believe that my first attempt in this direction is still in existence in Clarendon but I have been a little afraid to go to see it.

In the fall of the year in which I was nineteen, after the crops were in, I set out to get a wider field for my