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[Pg 58] 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[Pg 59] 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[Pg 60] reading or writing, you might as well expect it ............