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A wonderful family had Brother Jonathan. His children who lived to become of age became famous, and they were all remarkable as children. Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., could read Virgil at five, and had read Homer at twelve, and could talk with his father in Latin and Greek, and discuss Horace and Juvenal when a boy. He, as we have said, became a great painter, and commenced by drawing pictures in the sand which was sprinkled on his father’s floor. They used “herring-bone” to tidy rooms in those days, spare rooms, by dusting clean sand on the floor, in a wavy way, leaving the floor in the angles of a herring-bone. We do not know that it was in such herring-boning sand that young Trumbull began to draw pictures, but it may have been so.

We have visited the rooms in the old perpendicular house where he began to draw. His good father did not approve of his purpose to become a painter, but he thought that genius should be allowed to follow its own course. A man is never contented or satisfied outside of his natural gifts and haunting inclinations. So the battles into which his father’s spirit entered, John made immortal by painting, and his work may be seen not only in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, but in the “Trumbull Collection” at Yale College.