in turn glad when she is
glad, and sorry when she is sorry. She does not so take them into constant
companionship in her interests, each day,--the books, the papers she
reads, the things she sees,--that they learn to hold her as the
representative of much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and bread
and butter. She does not kiss them often enough, put her arms around them,
warm, soften, bathe them in the ineffable sunshine of loving ways. "I
can't imagine why children are so much better with you than with me,"
exclaims such a mother. No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble.
If she could, all would be righted. It is quite probable that she is a far
more anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor,
whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient;
while hers are pale and fretful and selfish and sullen.

She is all the time working, working, with endless activity, on hard, dry
clay; and the neighbor, who, perhaps half-unconsciously, keeps the clay
wet, is with one-half the labor modelling sweet creatures of Nature's own
loveliest shapes.

Then she says, this poor, tired mother, discouraged because her children
tell lies, and irritated because they seem to her thankless, "After all,
children are pretty much alike, I suppose. I believe most children tell
lies when they are little; and they never realize until they are grown up
what parents do for them."

Here again I find a similitude among the artists who paint or model.
Studios are full of such caricatures, and the hard-working, honest souls
who have made them believe that they are true reproductions of nature and
life.

"See my cherub. Are not all cherubs such as he?" and "Behold these trees
and this water; and how the sun glowed on the day when I walked there!"
and all the while the cherub is like a paper doll, and the trees and the
water never had any likeness to any thing that is in this beautiful earth.
But, after all, this similitude is short and paltry, for it is of
comparatively small moment that so many men and women spend their lives in
making bad cherubs in marble, and hideous landscapes in oil. It is
industry, and it keeps them in bread; in butter, too, if their cherubs and
trees are very bad. But, when it is a human being that is to be moulded,
how do we dare, even with all the help which we can ask and find in earth
and in heaven, to shape it by our touch!

Clay in the hands of the potter is not more p