“No, I shouldn’t,” said Homer, quietly; “in fact, I wish the poets would do that.  We’d have fewer bad poems to read; and that’s the way you should look at it.  I venture to say that if this modern plan of making busts and friezes in butter had been adopted at an earlier period, the public places in our great cities and our national Walhallas would seem less like repositories of comic art, since the first critical rays of a warm sun would have reduced the carven atrocities therein to a spot on the pavement.  The butter school of sculpture has its advantages, my boy, and you should be crowning the inventor of the system with laurel, and not heaping coals of fire upon his brow.”

“That,” said Burns, “is, after all, the solid truth, Phidias.  Take the brass caricatures of me, for instance.  Where would they be now if they had been cast in lard instead of in bronze?”

Phidias was silent a moment.

“Well,” he said, finally, as the value of the plan dawned upon his mind, “from that point of view I don’t know but what you are right, after all; and, to show that I have spoken in no vindictive spirit, let me propose a toast.  Here’s to the Butter Sculptors.  May their butter never give out.”

The toast was drained to the dregs, and Phidias went home feeling a little better.

CHAPTER X:  STORY-TELLERS’ NIGHT

It was Story-tellers’ Night at the house-boat, and the best talkers of Hades were impressed into the service.  Doctor Johnson was made chairman of the evening.

“Put him in the chair,” said Raleigh.  “That’s the only way to keep him from telling a story himself.  If he starts in on a tale he’ll make it a serial sure as fate, but if you make him the medium through which other story-tellers are introduced to the club he’ll be finely epigrammatic.  He can be very short and sharp when he’s talking about somebody else.  Personality is his forte.”

“Great scheme,” said Diogenes, who was chairman of the entertainment committee.  “The nights over here are long, but if Johnson started on a story they’d have to reach twice around eternity and halfway back to give him time to finish all he had to say.”

“He’s not very witty, in my judgment,” said Carlyle, who since his arrival in the other world has manifested some jealousy of Solomon and Doctor Johnson.

“That’s true enough,” said Raleigh; “but he’s strong, and he’s bound to say something that will put the audience in sympathy with the man that he introduces, and that’s half the success of a Story-tellers’ Night.  I’ve told stories myself.  If your audience doesn’t sympathize with you you’d be better off at home putting the baby to bed.”

And so it happened.  Doctor Johnson was made chairman, and the evening came.  The Doctor was in great form.  A list of the story-tellers had been sent him in advance, and he was prepared.  The audience was about as select a one as can be found in Hades.  The doors were thrown open to the friends of the members, and the smoke-furnace had been filled with a very superior quality of Arcadian mixture which Scott had brought back from a haunting-trip to the home of “The Little Minister,” at Thrums.