life of his own home. And it was once more a fragment of the good old times, when on Christmas Eve the little band came shouting round the house of gingerbread from _Hansel and Gretel_ which grandfather had built out of real gingerbread after his own drawing. [Illustration: L. RICHTER. AFTER WORK IT'S GOOD TO REST.] "If my art never entered amongst the lilies and roses on the summit of Parnassus, it bloomed by the roads and banks, on the hedges and in the meadows, and travellers resting by the wayside were glad of it, and little children made wreaths and crowns of it, and the solitary lover of nature rejoiced in its colour and fragrance, which mounted like a prayer to Heaven." Richter had the right to inscribe these words in his diary on his eightieth birthday. Through his works there echoes a humming and chiming like the joyous cry of children and the twitter of birds. Even his landscapes are filled with that blissful and solemn feeling that Sunday and the spring produce together in a lonely walk over field and meadow. The "_Gemüthlichkeit_," the cordiality, of German family-life, with a trait of contemplative romance, could find such a charming interpreter in none but him, the old man who went about in his long loose coat and had the face of an ordinary village schoolmaster. Only he who retained to his old age that childlike heart--to which the kingdom of heaven is given even in art--could really know the heart of the child's world, which even at a later date in Germany was not drawn more simply or more graciously.