Phidias. "For practice it's all right to use
butter, but for exhibition purposes--bah!"

Here Phidias, to show his contempt for butter as raw material in
sculpture, seized a wooden toothpick, and with it modelled a beautiful
head of Minerva out of the pat that stood upon the small plate at his
side, and before Burns could interfere had spread the chaste figure as
thinly as he could upon a piece of bread, which he tossed to the shade of
a hungry dog that stood yelping on the river-bank.

"Heavens!" cried Burns. "Imperious Caesar dead and turned to bricks is
as nothing to a Minerva carved by Phidias used to stay the hunger of a
ravening cur."

"Well, it's the way I feel," said Phidias, savagely.

"I think you are a trifle foolish to be so eternally vexed about it,"
said Homer, soothingly. "Of course you feel badly, but, after all,
what's the use? You must know that the mortals would pay more for one of
your statues than they would for a specimen of any modern sculptor's art;
yes, even if yours were modelled in wine-jelly and the other fellow's in
pure gold. So why repine?"

"You'd feel the same way if poets did a similarly vulgar thing," retorted
Phidias; "you know you would. If you should hear of a poet to-day
writing a poem on a thin layer of lard or butter, you would yourself be
the first to call a halt."

"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