N the fair isle of Cyprus, long ago, lived a young sculptor named Pygmalion. As a child he had been quick to see beauty in the forms around him, and while he found nothing better, he would dig the clay in the garden and sit for many a long hour happy in the shade of the trees, modelling horses and cows and human figures, whilst his mother was busied with her duties in the house. She, for her part, was glad he had found something to amuse him and keep him out of mischief, for he had no brothers or sisters to play with, and his father was dead, so they two lived alone together in a great white house between the mountains and the sea. From time to time she would come down into the garden to look at his figures and praise them; for though they were childish and crude, and sometimes grotesque, they were full of life and promise, and being a wise woman, she knew that where Nature points the way, it is well to make the road as smooth as may be. At first she gave him no better material to work with than the clay he could dig for himself, nor any master to teach him; for she wished to see how long he would persevere, and how far he would get alone. There are times, too, when a master can hinder more than he can teach.

One day when he was old enough, she took him down to the city below, where the people were keeping the feast of Aphrodite, and they watched the glad procession wind through the streets, with its choruses of priests and maidens, and little children scattering roses in the way. With the rest of the folk they followed the procession up the hill to the shining temple, and Pygmalion stood beside his mother, and wondered at the tapering white columns and the clouds of incense, and all the colours and fair forms such as he had never seen before. The picture of all these things he carried home in his mind, and thought of them by day and dreamt of them by night, till they became almost as real to him as the living forms he saw around him. Then he worked more busily than ever at his modelling in the garden; but whereas before he had been content to leave the figures he had made, standing them out in rows for his mother to admire, now he was no longer pleased with his work. He would look at the figure he had made and compare it with the image in his mind, and he saw that while his ideal was fair and beautiful beyond measure, his work was clumsy and rude. Then he would set to work and alter his model. But whatever he did he was not satisfied, and when his mother came down from the house to see him, she found him with broken bits lying about him, and never a finished figure to show her.

Then she knew that one of two things had happened; either he had come to the limit of his powers, and, as a child will, had grown tired of a thing in which he could make no further progress; or else he had reached an age when the mind sees fair forms which the hand cannot fashion, and in disgust at his failure he had broken up his figures, though they were better than what he had done before, because they fell short of the ideal in his mind.

"Thou art tired of playing with clay, my child," she said; "come with me, and I will see if we cannot find something that will please thee better."

So she kept him with her, and taught him letters, and read to him tales of the gods and heroes, till the child's eyes grew big with wonder, and she saw that all she read passed before his mind like a moving picture. She read to him from the old Greek poets, tales of bravery and might, of love and of adventure—tales, too, of cruelty and bloodshed, jealousy and hate. But whatever she read was beautiful, for the Greeks loved beauty above all things else, and clothed their thoughts in fair forms of words, so that even when they told of wickedness and wrong they left no stain of ugliness upon the mind. Pygmalion drank in eagerly all that was read to him, and because he had within him the soul of a poet he understood. The music of the words sank into his heart like seed planted in a fertile soil, which springs up to forms of loveliness and grace. So did the old tales bring before his eyes shapes of beauty, and once again he began to go down into the garden and try to mould them into figures of clay. His mother watched him, and saw that he persevered, and that week by week his models grew more beautiful and more true, as the image in his own mind grew clearer. Then she knew that her reading had done what she hoped it would do, and that the vague and fleeting visions had become for him forms as clear as those he saw around him.

"At least my son has the soul of an artist," she thought, "but whether he has the hands and the fingers of one who can do more than play with the clay, the gods alone can tell. He shall have a master to teach him, and in time we shall see whether he is one of the many in whom the divine fire burns, but whose bodies are instruments too coarse to carry out the thoughts of the soul, or whether he is one of the few who are able to do that of which others vainly dream."

So she gave him a master—a white-haired, venerable man, in whom lived the spirit of the old Greek sculptors, who had been the first to show mankind how stone and marble might be wrought into shapes of beauty. He taught the lad how to work in all kinds of stone and metal, and to copy faithfully the forms he saw around him. But he would not let him be satisfied with this alone, for he saw that he had in him the making of better things.

"Pygmalion," he would say, "in life there are many things that are not fair, but in art all things should be fair, and no art is truly great that is not beautiful. When thou lookest on the world, see only that which is beautiful; thou, because thou hast the soul of a poet, wilt see beauty where others cannot find it. Drink it in as a thirsty man will drink from the wayside stream, then give forth to the world, in stone, copies of those ideal forms thou seest with the eye of thy soul alone."

The child was an apt pupil; he understood, and did as his master bade him.

As the years flew by, he grew to be a man and a great sculptor, so that in the temples of the gods and the palaces of the rich his statues stood, and at the corners of the streets, a joy to rich and poor. The years, which had brought him to fame, had taken from him the white-haired old man, his master, and the mother who had helped to make him what he was; and now he lived alone in the great white house between the mountains and the sea. But he was happy, perfectly happy, working all day long at his images, and dreaming each night of fairer forms that he would some day work into stone and marble. His friends would come up from ............