The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    â€œWe shall have handbills printed, and I can see to the promotion of your works (you have always given good satisfaction), drive our wagon, care for our horse, look after your accounts, keep a sharp eye on would-be cheaters and frauds, and, in short, perform every useful task that would free you to your highest level of production.” He smiled grandly. “Fullerton and Wentworth Enterprises!” he added, with an expansive wave of his arm toward the hills. Tom saw us traveling the highways in full equipage—bank notes, no doubt, bristling among my palette knives, brushes, maul stick, easels, and frames.
    â€œHorse and wagon?” I asked. Tom looked wistfully toward our uncle’s barn.
    My uncle Simeon Wentworth had always played the petty tyrant about his farmlands and household. My Aunt Sally, a kind, generous woman given to the compensations of religious frenzy, could little alter her circumstances. And our cousins, Seth and Simeon junior, seemed unwilling to release themselves and strike out on their own. Yet Tom had pursued his education and tasted freedom; he had no more inclination than I to remain in thrall to our uncle’s farm a day longer than necessary.
    To be brief, Tom and I therefore pooled our meagre resources and purchased new palette boards, brushes, oils and varnishes, turpentine, drawing papers, dry colors, canvas, crayons, pencils, and sketching boards in sufficient quantity to get us underway. We then rehabilitated a broken wagon lying among weeds behind the dairy barn. When we felt ready, I wrote a letter to Aunt Sally explaining my desire to make my own way in the world, against convention, with Tom’s assistance, and thanking her for every care and kindness.
    Then one clear midnight in the summer of 1837, the nearly full moon shining above our truant heads, Tom and I stole out of my uncle’s farmhouse, the old patriarch’s snores rattling assurances that he was still wrapped in head handkerchief and slumber.
    Thus we began our journey together. We had hope of little more than improving our fortunes during the seasonable months of that year, and our only fear was that Uncle Simeon, imagining some breach of familial decorum or trust, would send for the constable to retrieve us. We knew Uncle Simeon well enough to expect that he would not take kindly to our pressing into service good old Rachel, now the farm’s matriarchal mare, who had served as Tom’s faithful companion since childhood during many a ramble and labor.
    But we made good time through the night and all the next day. Uncle Simeon’s outrage at our absconding we discovered much later when we were at a distance well beyond, or so we had thought, his despotic reprisals.
    And so began my adventures as a traveling painter. It shall soon become clear to any who continue to read that this portrait of myself is no vaporish fiction out of that handkerchief school so popular in these, and in my mother’s, days. I assure you that I have no intentions of adding yet another, in Mr. Fielding’s apt words, to the “swarm of … monstrous romances with which the world abounds” and which common readers can regard “only as proceeding from a pruritus, or indeed rather from a looseness of the brain.” Nor should my reader look in these pages for popular prophetic utterances, for confections of romantic idyl, nor for trumperies of battlefield heroism. On the contrary, my story depicts people and things as I found them, as commonplace as the spittoon and cigar, as the crowd of heavy-witted men and women swarming about you in the streets.

THREE
    First enterprisesThe persecution of a bearded man
    W ith God’s grace Tom and I found that we met with early success. After crossing the border to Massachusetts, we made our way to the village of Lakeworth where we found lodging to restore flagging bodies and spirits. Our plan was to move the next morning directly on to Fitchburg