translating for them--you will confer upon them one of the greatest
blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere.

WATER-COLORS

Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God
gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make
everything gray--every rose but the shadow of itself--every tree and
rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we
look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and
glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as
the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the
clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as
the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite
gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the
true painter fill it with joy and beauty.

There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom
the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us
walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others
ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain,
whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human
impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led
up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red,
yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected
in a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it
before. Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a
plate of tomato soup."

The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should
be taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is
as great an educator as true music. This knowledge of color harmony,
this matching and contrasting of different colors, but very few men
and women possess. When they do, it is generally inherited and thus a
natural gift. The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange
and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as
bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held
that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration,
furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into,
have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature--that the
russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues
of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-ro