Its first application will be to the study of your picture.

Yet if any accident, any unforeseen circumstances should prevent, I have made arrangements with my brother Sidney to hold the sum you have advanced subject to your order.

On these conditions I accept it, and will yet indulge the hope of giving you a picture acceptable to you." The picture was never painted, for the discouraged artist found neither time nor inclination ever to pick up his brush again; but we may be sure that the money, so generously advanced by his cousin, was repaid.
It was in the year 1841 also that, in spite of the difficulty he found in earning enough to keep him from actual starvation, he began to pay back the sums which had been advanced to him by his friends for the painting of a historical picture, which should, in a measure, atone to him for the undeserved slight of Congress.

In a circular addressed to each of the subscribers he gives the history of the matter and explains why he had hoped that the telegraph would supply him with the means to paint the picture, and then he adds:-- "I have, as yet, not realized one cent, and thus I find myself farther from my object than ever.

Upon deliberately considering the matter the last winter and spring, I came to the determination, in the first place, to free myself from the pecuniary obligation under which I had so long lain to my friends of the Association, and I commenced a system of economy and retrenchment by which I hoped gradually to amass the necessary sum for that purpose, which sum, it will be seen, amounts in the aggregate to $510.