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.

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.