Holy Innocents' night. I see the same rectory blazing from one end to the other with lights and dancing fires upon every hearth stone. The doors are wide open and I see coming up the winding road from the gate through pure white fresh-fallen snow a long procession of old and young, rich and poor, all in one happy band, coming from the enjoyment of the Christmas Tree at the church and making the snow-laden pines shiver to their very tops with the volume of glad voices shouting the melodious strains of 'Wonderful Night.' I see good cheer spread in abundance. I see, ah! I can see no more for the blinding tears."

As he was now no longer in charge of a parish he began to work harder than ever with brush and pencil, and besides the portraits on which he was engaged made many designs for more important work to be executed in the future to which he again looked forward with hope and confidence.

He had made a design of "The Shadow of the Rock" and writes he had "frequently tried to improve the figure. Last night it came to me. How my best things have always been a gift."

He improved much in health and strength, no doubt because the burden of the parish and school had been lifted from his shoulders and he was at the time making enough money to supply immediate needs and had besides good prospects of more remunerative work.

Of this he says: "And while the artists at the North are reduced to the verge of want, I, strange to contemplate, in a country without art and money, am having orders ahead and a reasonable prospect

of being able to go forward on the laudable and happy road of paying the debts of more disastrous years."

Several important designs were made at this time, "Isaiah on Mount Horeb," of which he made a finely finished and deep-toned drawing, and "Ezekiel," or "The Vision of Dry Bones." This was afterward painted and will be later described.

February 15, 1875, he received a call to the assistant rectorship of the church at Wilmington, but declined, "for," he said, "how can I pay my debts if I go? How can I follow art at all? I am not a free man to choose."

Most of the work on his important designs was done at night, as the portrait painting consumed all of the daylight. It was to him an irksome task, with his mind so filled with children of his own creation which he so longed to produce! He thus gives vent to his feelings in a letter to his wife (Mar. 18, 1875): "I go in the 'painting room' and look with horror at the row of stretchers gaping their backs of canvas with my name on each at me as in ghastly grin at the labor I, poor fellow, had to bestow on their opposite sides. It reminds one, this wretched sight, of the organ grinder you once saw in Tenth Street, New York, one fearfully hot day, drawling out dolefully the air 'Jordan is a hard road to travel' and some lounging chap tosses him a penny. What a pity that artists and clergymen have to eat and drink and need money like other folks; that they can not feed themselves and their families on beauty and morals.

"If the business I am now engaged in wore out

only brushes they could easily be replaced; but I have to be watchful it does not wear out my mind much more and leave it in a blank condition. It is not particularly enriched by the process."

Early in the spring (April) he went over in "Stokes" county to paint horses, and while there wrote he had held the first church service ever seen or heard in that county.

In the latter part of April his daughter and younger son left Lenoir for a visit to friends in the State and, as his elder son was already away at school, Mrs. Oertel was left alone and he planned to return.

"Eight long weary months," he says to her, "since I have had the light of your face. We have tried to be doing good, and by Divine grace have, I believe, effected our desires; but it has been at fearful expense to ourselves. I myself do not reckon it, but we are now by His own hand broken up and warned away from Lenoir, and since He has thus set us in motion on this course and race for freedom, I mean to keep on the run until I have crossed the Mason and Dixon line."

CHAPTER X.

He returned to Lenoir May 24, 1875, and moved his furniture into the studio where he and his wife lived for some time. He at once began to plan for important art work and determined to risk painting, "The Shadow of the Rock," but the general conditions and surroundings were not conducive to the freedom of thought so necessary to its successful execution. Though living in the studio, he and his wife had to go to a neighbor's, half a mile distant, for meals, which made a serious break in his days. Then the separation from the children, the scattered condition of his household, and being forced to remain in his former field of labor and see day by day his cherished work fade away and die and be unable to raise a hand to save it was hard to endure.

"As for the parish," writes Mrs. Oertel, "we feel much like standing by the bedside of a dying loved one and watching each breath grow fainter; disintegration and decay seems to be written over the door."

Besides this, he had been out of the art world for years and constantly drawing on his own mental resources without opportunity for study or aid of any kind whatever.

He felt this keenly and so feared to trust him

self to go on with the large work in his present condition that he made plans to go to New York and paint it there.

This, however, he was forced to relinquish for lack of funds, though about the same time he gave $50 toward the support of the mission school and paid over $1,300 on his debts.

It was no new thing for him to work under every difficulty, so he began, June, 1875, to paint, as best he might, "The Shadow of the Rock," 8 by 10 feet in size, with the intention of sending it to the Centennial Exposition soon to be held in Philadelphia. This is from the text:

"And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Isaiah 32: 2.

On the left-hand side of the picture stretches the awful waste of the desert. It lies under the glaring noon-day sun, yellow, shimmering with intense heat, stones strewn about, their keen edges sharply defined beneath the fierce sunshine, and along the distant horizon the death-dealing sand storm is sweeping up with a terrible fury, a "weary land" indeed!

On the other side of the picture, covering nearly half of the canvas, there rises a rock so high that the top is not seen. At the base, from a cleft in its side, there gushes out a bubbling spring of bright water. All around the rill formed by the spring, emerald green grass gemmed with flowers, oleanders in full bloom, with other shrubbery in luxuriant profusion, cover the otherwise arid soil.