This irate old gentleman was an admirable teacher,--or at least he would have been an admirable teacher if we could have enjoyed eternal youth in which to profit by his lessons, to master step by step the deep-laid foundations of an art. As it was, few of us ever got beyond the first feeble paces, beyond those prolonged beginnings which had no significance in our eyes. Yet we knew that other children, children not more richly endowed by nature than we were, made real pictures that, with careful retouching, were deemed worthy of frames, and of places upon parental walls. Adelaide Harrison had a friend who went to a fashionable city school, and who had sent her--in proof of wide attainments--a work of art which filled us with envy and admiration. It was a winter landscape; a thatched cottage with wobbly walls, a bit of fence, and two quite natural-looking trees, all drawn on a prepared surface of blue and brown,--blue on top for the sky, brown underneath for the earth. Then--triumph of realism--this surface was scraped away in spots with a penknife, and the white cardboard thus brought to light presented a startling resemblance to snow,--snow on the cottage roof, snow on the branches of the trees, patches of snow on the ground. It seemed easy to do, and was beautiful when done,--a high order of art, and particularly adapted, by reason of its wintriness, for Christmas gifts. I urged Adelaide to show it to Dr. Eckhart, and to ask him if we might not do something like it, instead of wasting our young lives, and possibly some hidden genius, in futile attempts to draw an uninspiring group of cones and cylinders. Adelaide, who was not without courage, and whose family had a high opinion of her talents, undertook this dangerous commission, and at our next lesson actually proffered her request. Dr. Eckhart glared like an angry bull. He held the landscape out at arm's length, turning it round and round, as if uncertain which was earth and which was heaven. "And that," he said, indicating with a derisive thumb a spot of white, "what, may I ask, is that?" "Snow," said Adelaide. "Snow!" with a harsh cackle. "And do we then scratch in the ground like hens for snow? Eh! tell me that! Like hens?" And he laughed, softened in some measure by an appreciation of his own wit. Adelaide stood her ground. But she thought it as well to have some one stand by her side. "Agnes wants to do a picture, too," she said.