The slightest touch tells on the clay when it is soft and moist, and can produce just the effect which is desired; but when the clay is too dry it will not yield, and often it breaks and crumbles beneath the unskilful hand.  How perfect the analogy between these two results, and the two atmospheres which one often sees in the space of one half-hour in the management of the same child!  One person can win from it instantly a gentle obedience:  that person’s smile is a reward, that person’s displeasure is a grief it cannot bear, that person’s opinions have utmost weight with it, that person’s presence is a controlling and subduing influence.  Another, alas! the mother, produces such an opposite effect that it is hard to believe the child can be the same child.  Her simplest command is met by antagonism or sullen compliance; her pleasure and displeasure are plainly of no account to the child, and its great desire is to get out of her presence.

What shape will she make of that child’s soul?  She does not wet the clay.  She does not stop to consider before each command whether it be wholly just, whether it be the best time to make it, and whether she can explain its necessity.  Oh! the sweet reasonableness of children when disagreeable necessities are explained to them, instead of being enforced as arbitrary tyrannies!  She does not make them so feel that she shares all their sorrows and pleasures that they cannot help being in turn glad when she is glad, and sorry when she is sorry.  She does not so take them into constant companionship in her interests, each day,—­the books, the papers she reads, the things she sees,—­that they learn to hold her as the representative of much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and bread and butter.  She does not kiss them often enough, put her arms around them, warm, soften, bathe them in the ineffable sunshine of loving ways.  “I can’t imagine why children are so much better with you than with me,” exclaims such a mother.  No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble.  If she could, all would be righted.  It is quite probable that she is a far more anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor, whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient; while hers are pale and fretful and selfish and sullen.

She is all the time working, working, with endless activity, on hard, dry clay; and the neighbor, who, perhaps half-unconsciously, keeps the clay wet, is with one-half the labor modelling sweet creatures of Nature’s own loveliest shapes.

Then she says, this poor, tired mother, discouraged because her children tell lies, and irritated because they seem to her thankless, “After all, children are pretty much alike, I suppose.  I believe most children tell lies when they are little; and they never realize until they are grown up what parents do for them.”

Here again I find a similitude among the artists who paint or model.  Studios are full of such caricatures, and the hard-working, honest souls who have made them believe that they are true reproductions of nature and life.