air of an old family housekeeper, to ask what we would have for dinner, and was careful and exact in buying “three penn’orth” of herbs at a time for us, to season our soup.  I ought to mention that in both these places we made the greater part of our purchases ourselves, having weekly bills sent in from the shops, and in our names, exactly as if we were living in our own house.  All honest lodging-house keepers, we were told, preferred this method, as leaving no opening for any unjust suspicions of their fairness in providing.  But, if one chooses to be as absolutely free from trouble as in boarding, the marketing can all be done by the family, and the bills still made out in the lodgers’ names.  I have been thus minute in my details because I think there may be many to whom this system of living is as unknown as it was to me; and I cannot but hope that it may yet be introduced in America.

Wet the Clay.

Once I stood in Miss Hosmer’s studio, looking at a statue which she was modelling of the ex-queen of Naples.  Face to face with the clay model, I always feel the artist’s creative power far more than when I am looking at the immovable marble.

A touch here—­there—­and all is changed.  Perhaps, under my eyes, in the twinkling of an eye, one trait springs into life and another disappears.

The queen, who is a very beautiful woman, was represented in Miss Hosmer’s statue as standing, wearing the picturesque cloak that she wore during those hard days of garrison life at Gaeta, when she showed herself so brave and strong that the world said if she, instead of that very stupid young man her husband, had been king, the throne need not have been lost.  The very cloak, made of light cloth showily faced with scarlet, was draped over a lay figure in one corner of the room.  In the statue the folds of drapery over the right arm were entirely disarranged, simply rough clay.  The day before they had been apparently finished; but that morning Miss Hosmer had, as she laughingly told us, “pulled it all to pieces again.”

As she said this, she took up a large syringe and showered the statue from head to foot with water, till it dripped and shone as if it had been just plunged into a bath.  Now it was in condition to be moulded.  Many times a day this process must be repeated, or the clay becomes so dry and hard that it cannot be worked.

I had known this before; but never did I so realize the significant symbolism of the act as when I looked at this lifeless yet lifelike thing, to be made into the beauty of a woman, called by her name, and cherished after her death,—­and saw that only through this chrysalis of the clay, so cared for, moistened, and moulded, could the marble obtain its soul.

And, as all things I see in life seem to me to have a voice either for or of children, so did this instantly suggest to me that most of the failures of mothers come from their not keeping the clay wet.