e room where little
Bertel sat in his night-shirt by the spinning wheel. The wheel of time
has turned, and new gods have come forth from the stone. From the
boats there arose a shout: 'Hurrah, hurrah for Bertel Thorwaldsen!'"

[Illustration: LITTLE BERTEL'S AMBITION.]

TWENTY-FOURTH EVENING.

"I will now give you a picture from Frankfort," said the Moon. "I
especially noticed one building there. It was not the house in which
Goethe was born, nor the old Council House, through whose grated
windows peered the horns of the oxen that were roasted and given to
the people when the emperors were crowned. No, it was a private house,
plain in appearance, and painted green. It stood near the old Jews'
Street. It was Rothschild's house.

"I looked through the open door. The staircase was brilliantly
lighted: servants carrying wax candles in massive silver candlesticks
stood there, and bowed low before an old woman, who was being brought
downstairs in a litter. The proprietor of the house stood bare-headed,
and respectfully imprinted a kiss on the hand of the old woman. She
was his mother. She nodded in a friendly manner to him and to the
servants, and they carried her into the dark narrow street, into a
little house, that was her dwelling. Here her children had been born,
from hence the fortune of the family had arisen. If she deserted the
despised street and the little house, fortune would also desert her
children. That was her firm belief."

The Moon told me no more; his visit this evening was far too short.
But I thought of the old woman in the narrow despised street. It would
have cost her but a word, and a brilliant house would have arisen for
her on the banks of the Thames--a word, and a villa would have been
prepared in the Bay of Naples.

"If I deserted the lowly house, where the fortunes of my sons first
began to bloom, fortune would desert them!" It was a superstition, but
a superstition of such a class, that he who knows the story and has
seen this picture, need have only two words placed under the picture
to make him understand it; and these two words are: "A mother."

TWENTY-FIFTH EVENING.

"It was yesterday, in the morning twilight"--these are the words the
Moon told me--"in the great city no chimney was yet smoking--and it
was just at the chimneys that I was looking. Suddenly a little head
emerged from one of them, and then half a body, the arms resting on
the rim of the chimney-pot. 'Ya-hip! ya-hip!'