Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

WILMINGTON, QUAKERS & AMBITIONS
a distinctive personality did not discourage or alarm his
family, as they are so likely to do among more conventional
people. His mother had visions of her son fulfilling the
dreams which she had had in her own childhood and youth,
and was overjoyed that he was giving such manifestations
of promise. He was allowed to sketch and to scribble
away-for he wanted to write as well as to draw-as much
as he pleased, and his mother was always ready to make
suggestions and to criticize whatever he produced. Who
would deny that such patience and such sympathy on the
part of the mother had an incomparable effect on the development of the impulses already strong in the child? Of
course, there' were moments when more typically boyish
ambitions stirred within him. There was a decided thrill
in watching the locomotives come rushing through on the
old Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad,
and he dreamed of the glories of being a train engineer.
And those delightful years in the country had given a
glamour to that sort of life, that made him occasionally look
forward to being a farmer. This last may, perhaps, have
been merely a result of family habit, for his ancestors had
been for many generations farmers in the peaceful Pennsylvania and Delaware hills. Always, however, he came
back to the continual sketching; there was scarcely ever a
break of any considerable length of time.
Punch continued to be one of the principal reading
supplies of the family. In his later letters, Howard speaks
again and again of the pictures by Leech and Doyle and
Tenniel, and the essays by Thackeray and Douglas Jerrold. These had an immeasurable influence on his work,
especially that of his earliest period. It was at this time
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