s lion.
Corot took the study and made a number of sketches of it. Somehow his
landscape would not fit St. Jerome, so he painted a man on horseback
and a dog going off into the woods. Then in the place of St. Jerome
praying he put a woman gathering bits of wood and another woman with a
bundle of fagots under her arm. Now the picture must have another name
and he called it "The Wood Gatherers." When you go to Washington, you
must not fail to see this picture in the Corcoran Art Gallery.

[Illustration: FIG. 4. THE WOOD-GATHERERS. COROT. Courtesy of the
Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D. C.]

AURORA

GUIDO RENI (1575-1642)

Hyperion had three wonderful children, Apollo, the god of the sun,
Selene, the goddess of the moon, and Aurora, the goddess of the dawn.
When Aurora appears her sister, Selene (the moon), fades and night
rolls back like a curtain. Now let us look at this masterpiece by
Guido Reni carefully that we may know how wonderful is the coming of
day.

Aurora, in a filmy white robe, is dropping flowers in the path of
Apollo (the sun) as he drives his dun-colored horses above the
sleeping Earth. The Horae (the hours), a gliding, dancing group of
lovely beings, accompany the brilliant god. Each hour is clothed in
garments of a special tint of the great light of day, red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, purple, and violet. The golden-hued Apollo sits
supreme in his chariot of the sun.

The fresco--fresco means painted on fresh plaster--is on the ceiling
of the Rospigliosi Palace, Rome. The painting is as brilliant in color
to-day as it was when painted three hundred and fifty years ago.

Aurora, like most of the gods and goddesses, fell in love with a
mortal. She asked Zeus to make her husband immortal but she forgot to
ask that he should never grow old. And, fickle woman that she was!
when he became gray and infirm, she deserted him and, to put a stop to
his groans, she turned him into a grasshopper.

Her son, Memnon, was made king of the Ethiopians, and in the war of
Troy he was overcome by Achilles. When Aurora, who was watching him
from the sky, saw him fall she sent his brothers, the Winds, to take
his body to the banks of a river in Asia Minor. In the evening the
mother and the Hours and the Pleiades came to weep over her dead son.
Poor Aurora! even to-day her tears are seen in the dewdrops on the
grass at early dawn.

[Illustration: Courtesy of Pratt Institute

FIG. 5. THE AURORA. GUIDO R