Let us hush our noisy activities and stale anxieties, and under the trees and in the open that they love listen to the words of refreshing wisdom dropping like jewels from their naïve lips.

Let us be willing to sit at their dainty little feet, so unused to the dusty roads of this world, and learn from them divinest lessons. Let us with uplifted hearts realize our responsibility when with unconscious humility they accept us as their guides in the sweet, fresh morning of their lives.

O sister-mothers in the world, let us awaken to a deeper sense of this sublime trust, our high charge in the care of these immortal treasures, only for a little while, such a little while, given into our keeping! Let us make our hearts, our minds, our consciences worthy of these transcendent marvels of life!

Oh, joy of joys! Oh, purest wonder! How often my children lift the invisible veils that hide undreamed of casements opening out on luminous vistas of the mystical world in which they wander, roaming fancy-free with keen and wondering delight!

Take me with you, oh, take me with you, children mine, when with bright eyes and with kindled imaginations all spirit, fire and dew, you sally forth on these highroads of discovery, to the elysiums of your day-dreams, peopled by the souls of birds, animals, flowers and pictures in happy communion!

IN my guest-room there hang framed in bamboo, four paintings of the seasons, the progress of nature through the year, a favorite theme with Japanese artists. Generally painters delight in drawing the seasons in their childhood. My artist, a native of Ise, shows them in their maturity.

A wild wistaria in purple bloom, with a green pheasant feeding among bamboo grass, symbolizes spring in the lovely sunny month of May. A branch of a maple-tree touched by November's flaming torch, with sparrows sparring in

headlong descent, represents the wane of the year, autumn. In a garden blotted out with snow two bantam fowls stand disconsolately, and the miniature hen has her head hidden under her wing. In the cold barrenness their black tails and vermilion combs are the only touch of redeeming color.

But for me and my heart knows why the most beautiful of all is the exquisite painting of midsummer.

A pond of water-lilies gives the impression of languorous coolness, with its esthetic call to the mind. The white flowers, their beautiful corollas upturned somewhat expectantly, almost appealingly, to the sky, are in full bloom, nestling amid the circular green leaves, and between them and some thin spears of reeds, heightening the wraith-like effect of the water-lilies, is seen the shimmer of the pale-blue water. And, oh, a breeze softly moves the water and stirs among the leaves!

A kingfisher, having just risen from a raid on the water, with a fish in its beak is flying over the blossoms and apparently making for its nest in direct flight.

The flash of the brilliant plumage, the cruel indifference of the beak, the tense curve of the captured minnow, are in striking contrast with the calm, dreamlike life of the glimmering pool below.

The pretty scene had always conveyed a sense of far-away rest and beauty to me, but through a child's original mind and her deep feeling for the communion of life in nature a new interpretation has now animated the picture and thrown a new light upon it.

One day my little girl, Shinaye Eugenia, then ten years of age, came into the room, and, gazing at the picture, said:

"It seems as if the water-lilies are looking up at the kingfisher as if they felt sorry for the poor fish!"

Thus through a child's imaginative insight into the sympathy of life in nature I became a privileged sharer in the tender emotion of the water-lilies.

HE picture has always reached more people than

T the printed page. That is

truer than ever in these

days of the camera and the movie. The happening of this morning is illustrated in the newspaper, and thrown on the screen on the same day. The history of the world is currently told in a pictorial language clear to all, which he who runs may read. Pictures have always formed the most direct and understandable record of the doings of mankind, from the prehistoric days of the cavemen to the present time. There is one difference, however: many of the pictures which we are printing now will die with the perishable paper on which they are published. But from other days, when conditions of paper-making were different, there have come down to us not only painted canvases, but printed pictures of all kinds-"prints," as we call them. These give us invaluable records of the manners and ideas and

deeds of those who went before us. In these we see how our ancestors lived, and we live again with them.

The picturesque days "befo' de Wah" in our country (1800-1860) are brought before us most vividly and directly in the pictures made at the time. In those days we had a school of genre painters who knew nothing of the modern objection to the "story in the picture." They painted the life about them with a healthy human interest in the doings of the farmers and others among whom they lived, as well as the Indians, trappers, and other figures of the West. There is no doubt that they painted what the public wanted, for they sold their paintings. In addition, these were well reproduced in engravings and lithographs, thus reaching thousands who might not see the original canvases.

In these pictures, made by eye-witnesses, and not just built up from hearsay in studios, we see the daily life of the people of those times. It is a period

that already seems far distant indeed, with such slogans as "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too," or "Fifty-four forty or fight," or its peculiar and characteristic combinations in costume, such as the flowered waistcoats and tall hats worn by carpenters or others at work. There were crudities, particularly in city life, which Mrs. Trollope and Charles Dickens caricatured vigorously, but there was also the force of a young nation building its future and intent on progress.

It is an interesting fact that some of our best genre art was inspired by the quieter East rather than by the wild West, by the farm rather than by the city. It was largely a native product, and it presented life just as truthfully and as well as the artists could do it.

Alvan Fisher told that garrulous chronicler William Dunlap that in 1815 he "began painting a species of pictures which had not been practiced much, if any, in this country, viz: barn-yard scenes and scenes belonging to country life, etc."

Fisher did not come triumphantly down the corridors of fame, but a generation. later an abler artist, William Sidney Mount, was attracted by similar subjects. Mount, one of our best-known painters of home scenes, found his subjects right among his farmer neighbors on Long Island. He painted them with a simple, straightforward realism that insured popularity. One proof of his hold on the public is found in the fact that many of his paintings were reproduced in engraving. The very titles of his pictures are suggestive: "Swapping Horses," "Bargaining for a Horse" and its sequel, "Coming to the Point," "Long Island Farmer," "Husking Corn," "Turning the Grindstone, "Ringing the Pigs," "A Tough Story," "The Farmer's Nooning." Farmer's Nooning." You are set fairly among these people. You hear the fiddler scraping "Old Dan Tucker"; you see the two men in "Bargaining for a Horse" sending the chips flying as they whittle to conceal their anxiety about the

business in hand, just as one may bluff at poker. You share in the absorbing interest of the "Goose Raffle," with its chance of bringing home a fine Christmas dinner. And in "The Tough Story" you gather with the group around the stove, that magnet of the village store. Mount was the raciest, the closest to the soil, among our painters of rural life.

Another artist who pictured the doings of country people was F. W. Edmonds, who painted pleasingly, though with less force than Mount, and who presented farm-house interiors with interesting details. Among his pictures were "The New Scholar," "The Pan of Milk," "The New Bonnet," "The Windmill" (a man carving a toy windmill for a child), and especially "Sparking," well known through a large and good steel engraving issued by the old American Art Union. This last one is an amusing version of the old and ever new story, the country swain lolling in an awkward attempt to appear at ease, while the young lady pares apples with apparent unconcern, as did Katrina Van Tassel, in Daniel Huntington's 1 See headpiece.

picture illustrating Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," or the provoking maiden in Lowell's "Courtin'." This picture also presents a complete and interesting record of a farm-house room.

R. Caton Woodville does not carry quite the same conviction of the eyewitness as did Mount or Edmonds. His compositions look built up rather than caught "off the bat." Perhaps the best known and most natural of his pictures is "Mexican News," showing a group of men on the stoop of a hotel in a small town listening to the reading of a newspaper report on the Mexican War. This "American Hotel" serves also as the post-office; the entrance to the bar is seen, and in the foreground a demijohn further emphasizes the absence of prohibition legislation in those days. The attitude and expression of the reader are rather strained, but the interest of the listeners is expressed naturally, and the man at the left, with the mammoth plaid design in his trousers, has forgotten his whittling in his attention to the news.

There were various other painters who occasionally put on canvas certain types