Great indeed is the gulf between the Javanese artist and the American, Benjamin West, who said: "A kiss from my mother made me a painter." To a kiss from the Virgin Mother of Christ, legend says, St. Chrysostom owed his "golden mouth." The story runs thus: "St. Chrysostom was a dull boy at school, and so disturbed was he by the ridicule of his fellows, that he went into a church to pray for help to the Virgin. A voice came from the image: 'Kiss me on the mouth, and thou shalt be endowed with all learning.' He did this, and when he returned to his schoolfellows they saw a golden circle about his mouth, and his eloquence and brilliancy astounded them" (347. 621). Among the natives of the Andaman Islands, Mr. Man informs us, "Kisses are considered indicative of affection, but are only bestowed upon infants" (498. 79). _Tears_. "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair, Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, In looking at the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more." Thus sang the great English laureate, and to the simple folk--the treasure-keepers of the lore of the ages--his words mean much. Pliny, the Elder, in his _Natural History_, makes this statement: "Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she [Nature] abandon to cries and lamentations;" the writer of the _Wisdom of Solomon_, in the Apocrypha, expresses himself in like manner: "When I was born, I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth, which is of like nature, and the first voice I uttered was crying, as all others do." Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_, bluntly resumes both: "He is born naked, and falls a-whining at the first." The Spaniards have a proverb, brusque and cynical:-- "Des que naeí lloré, y cada dia nace porqué. [I wept as soon as I was born, and every day explains why.]" A quaint legend of the Jewish Rabbis, however, accounts for children's tears in this fashion:-- "Beside the child unborn stand two angels, who not only teach it the whole Tora [the traditional interpretation of the Mosaic law], but also let it see all the joys of Paradise and all the torments of Hell. But, since it may not be that a child should come into the world endowed with such knowledge, ere it is born into the life of men an angel strikes it on the upper lip, and all wisdom vanishes. The dimple on the upper lip is the mark of the stroke, and this is why new-born babes cry and weep" (385. 6). Curiously enough, as if to emphasize the relativity of folk-explanations, a Mussulman legend states that it is "the touch of Satan" that renders the child "susceptible of sin from its birth," and that is the reason why "all children cry aloud when they are born" (547. 249).