Our town has been very lively this winter. First we had two circuses,
and then we had the small-pox, and now we've got a course of lectures. A
course of lectures is six men, and you can go to sleep while they're
talking, if you want to, and you'd better do it unless they are
missionaries with real idols or a magic lantern. I always go to sleep
before the lectures are through, but I heard a good deal of one of them
that was all about art.
Art is almost as useful as history or arithmetic, and we ought all to
learn it, so that we can make beautiful things and elevate our minds.
Art is done with mud in the first place. The art man takes a large chunk
of mud and squeezes it until it is like a beautiful man or woman, or
wild bull, and then he takes a marble gravestone and cuts it with a
chisel until it is exactly like the piece of mud. If you want a solid
photograph of yourself made out of marble, the art man covers your face
with mud, and when it gets hard he takes it off, and the inside of it is
just like a mould, so that he can fill it full of melted marble which
will be an exact photograph of you as soon as it gets cool.
This is what one of the men who belong to the course of lectures told
us. He said he would have shown us exactly how to do art, and would have
made a beautiful portrait of a friend of his, named Vee Nuss, right on
the stage before our eyes, only he couldn't get the right kind of mud. I
believed him then, but I don't believe him now. A man who will contrive
to get an innocent boy into a terrible scrape isn't above telling what
isn't true. He could have got mud if he'd wanted it, for there was
mornamillion tons of it in the street, and it's my belief that he
couldn't have made anything beautiful if he'd had mud a foot deep on the
stage.
As I said, I believed everything the man said, and when the lecture was
over, and father said, "I do hope Jimmy you've got some benefit from the
lecture this time" and Sue said, "A great deal of benefit that boy will
ever get unless he gets it with a good big switch don't I wish I was his
father O! I'd let him know," I made up my mind that I would do some art
the very next day, and show people that I could get lots of benefit if I
wanted to.
I have spoken about our baby a good many times. It's no good to anybody,
and I call it a failure. It's a year and three months old now, and it
can't talk or walk, and as for reading or writing, you might as well
expect it to play base-ball. I always knew how to read and write, and
there must be something the matter with this baby, or it would know
more.
Last Monday mother and Sue went out to make calls, and left me to take
care of the baby. They had done that before, and the baby had got me
into a scrape, so I didn't want to be exposed to its temptations; but
the more I begged them not to leave me, the more they would do it, and
mother said, "I know you'll stay and be a good boy while we go and make
those horrid calls," and Sue said, "I'd better or I'd get what I
wouldn't like."
After they'd gone I tried to think what I could do to please them, and
make everybody around me better and happier. After a while I thought
that it would be just the thing to do some art and make a marble
photograph of the baby, for that would show everybody that I had got
some benefit from the lectures, and the photograph of the baby would
delight mother and Sue.
I took mother's fruit-basket and filled it with mud out of the back
yard. It was nice thick mud, and it would stay in any shape that you
squeezed it into, so that it was just the thing to do art with. I laid
the baby on its back on the bed, and covered its face all over with the
mud about two inches thick. A fellow who didn't know anything about art
might have killed the baby, for if you cover a baby's mouth and nose
with mud it can't breathe, which is very unhealthy, but I left its nose
so it could breathe, and intended to put an extra piece of mud over that
part of the mould after it was dry. Of course the baby howled all it
could, and it would have kicked dreadfully, only I fastened its arms and
legs with a shawl-strap so that it couldn't do itself any harm.
[Illustration: THE MOMENT THEY SAW THE BABY THEY SAID THE MOST DREADFUL
THINGS.]
The mud wasn't half dry when mother and Sue and father came in, for he
met them at the front gate. They all came up-stairs, and the moment they
saw the baby they said the most dreadful things to me without waiting
for me to explain. I did manage to explain a little through the closet
door while father was looking for his rattan cane, but it didn't do the
least good.
I don't want to hear any more about art or to see any more lectures.
There is nothing so ungrateful as people, and if I did do what wasn't
just what people wanted, they might have remembered that I meant well,
and only wanted to please them and elevate their minds.