n to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be
some one who could draw pictures for me while talking--pictures like
those of Tenniel in _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the
Looking-Glass_. How much better we know Alice herself and the White
Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures
than even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not only
draw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. I
want to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaks
and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some
gold and silver too, and not merely black and white--though black and
white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed
me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could
put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't
you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who
can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest
houses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing
is, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts
half as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people
he produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them,
and while he talks he seems to make them live, so that I can hardly
believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any one
you ever saw.

Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like
that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but
merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived,
every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a
kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't
matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that
matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture
is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall
away off at Assisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to
a lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and looking
pleased--the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm
or fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person
too, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really
true, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter
helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that b