I have often wondered why we of to-day have almost forgotten about Master Bernard, Master Bernard whom the readers of our grandmothers’ generation immortalized. I suppose the cultivated virtue of novelty which in this restless era demands incessant changing of school-books from term to term failed to bring old Palissy along with it. In earlier days it was part and parcel of one’s polite education to know something of Master Bernard, at least to know that there had once lived such a person. In those less curriculumed yesterdays the story of Palissy the Potter was always a welcome one. Perhaps we ourselves have merely overlooked the matter, and so I make here this venture, believing time has intended no slight to Master Bernard’s memory. How well I recall a certain lower shelf in a library which regaled a rainy autumn day in my tender years! There were treasures here convenient to the hand of one aged nine, treasures fitting the advancement of learning laboriously attained under the unflinching persistence of an all-too-faithful governess. In this sanctuary I chanced in childhood to come upon a tiny octavo bound in blue, stamped with gilt morning-glories, morning-glories such as I have always associated, for some unexplained reason, with the long-late Prince Albert and the equally long-late Lucy Larcom! Within the covers of this little book was a highly embellished frontispiece, hand-stenciled in colors of saffron, scarlet, and azure, with an overwhelmingly deep dash of bottle-green. I imagine this volume emerged from the press at a time when aniline dyes self-proclaimed their advent to the mediocrity of the day. Beyond that I do not venture a date. This giddy frontispiece seemed, even in my childish eyes, profanely gay for the subject it presented. Here was depicted the figure of a bearded man in foreign dress, visage forlorn, person unkempt. The artist pictured him in the act of destroying a quantity of furniture of a sort that might have given distinction to an early Victorian parlor. Just what seemed so terrifying about the situation I do not know, unless it was that, as I distinctly recall, I myself had occasionally been regarded as somewhat destructive in the furniture line--as when, quite unintentionally, I scratched my great-aunt’s mahogany sofa in making a desperate attempt not to slide off its hair-covered plateau at a moment when the peculiarly poignant texture of this revered fabric had caused me unwittingly to squirm about in manœvering for a less irritating bit of the area. From that time on a certain Miss Solander, occupying the important post of governess, could not adjust her perspective to considering me other than a menace to mahogany in the front of the house or black walnut in the rear.