In 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.