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This story was suggested by the life of the painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion Miss Brundage, who lived and farmed together for many years on Red Mill Road, Greenville Town, Greene County, New York State, in the early part of the nineteenth century. Not much is left of them. Even their hill - still called Brundage - is partly gone, bulldozed for road improvement. I couldn't find them in any Greene County census, or in the records of land transactions in the Catskill courthouse. Still, something is left. The bright, playful watercolors are left. And "Admirer of Art", a friend, wrote a note about Miss Willson and Miss Brundage. It's safe in a book.1 What looks to be Admirer of Art's first draft is safe in the Vedder Library of theGreene County Historical Society at Coxsackie, New York. There is another account in a book called Picturesque Catskills.2 So we know anout their "romantic attachment" to each other, their quiet peaceful life, the respect and help of their neighbors, their dooryard full of flowers, their plowing and haying, their cow, the improvised paints - berries and brick dust - the paintings sold for twenty-five cents to neighbors or bartered to peddlers who carried them all over eastern North America, from Canada to Mobile. And we know our own response. We are provoked to tender dreams by a hint. Any stone from their hill is a crystal ball. ---Isabel Miller 1. Lipman, Jean and Black, Mary C. American Folk Painting. New York: C. N. Potter, 1966. 2. DeLisser, R. Lionel. Picturesque Catskills. Northampton, sMass.: Picturesque Publishing Co., 1894. Reprinted 1967 by Hope Farm Press, Cornwallville, N.Y. From the novel Patience & Sarah, A
Fawcett Crest Book. Published by Ballantine Books. 
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