“God is the refuge of his saints, When storms of sharp distress invade.” And the little Nicole, who is busily occupied in mimic pottery-work at the door of the shed, chimes in with his small voice, and beats the time with his wooden spade. Lisette’s face brightened as she listened, and with cheerful tones, she summoned Bernard indoors, and bade the little boy lead his sister back. Notwithstanding Palissy’s psalmody and the cheerful face he wore, matters were far from satisfactory at this peculiar juncture. In fact, he had just undergone a heavy disappointment, and was secretly making up his mind to a step which it cost him a grievous heartache to have recourse to. Seeing that all his experiments with his own furnace had proved failures, he determined to adopt a new scheme, and send the compositions to be tested in the kiln of some potter. For this purpose he bought a large stock of crockery, which according to custom, he broke into small fragments; three or four hundreds of which he covered with various mixtures, and sent to a pottery some league and a half off, requesting the workmen to bake this strange batch with their own vessels. They consented readily to let the amateur potter try his experiments; but alas! when the operation was complete, and the trial pieces were drawn out, they proved absolutely worthless. Not the smallest appearance of the longed-for enamel was to be seen on any of them. The cause of the failure was a secret, at the time, to the grievously disappointed Bernard, and he returned home heavily discouraged, for he knew that his wife and children were deprived of many comforts they might have enjoyed, had he continued steadily at his occupation of glass-working and surveying. What was to be done? “Begin afresh.” And so, again he fell to work, compounding and grinding, and sending more batches to the same potters to be baked as before. This he had continued to do time after time, “with great cost, loss of time, confusion, and sorrow.” [Picture: . . the trial pieces were . . absolutely worthless] At length a more than usually trying failure had occurred, and many things combined to warn our artist that he must desist for a season and procure some remunerative work. His home resources were completely exhausted; while the home wants had greatly multiplied, and he could not be blind to the sorrowful looks of the woman he loved, nor indifferent to the necessities of his babes.