thinking to
detract, say: 'People read more in this or that work of genius than
was ever written in it,' not perceiving that they pay the highest
compliment. If we pick up the finger and nail of a real man, we can
decipher a whole story--could almost reconstruct the creature again,
from head to foot. But half the body of a Mumboo-jumbow idol leaves us
utterly in the dark as to what the rest was like. We see what we see,
but nothing more. There is nothing so universally intelligible as truth.
It has a thousand meanings, and suggests a thousand more."

He turned over the wooden thing.

"Though a man should carve it into matter with the least possible
manipulative skill, it will yet find interpreters. It is the soul that
looks out with burning eyes through the most gross fleshly filament.
Whosoever should portray truly the life and death of a little
flower--its birth, sucking in of nourishment, reproduction of its kind,
withering and vanishing--would have shaped a symbol of all existence.
All true facts of nature or the mind are related. Your little carving
represents some mental facts as they really are, therefore fifty
different true stories might be read from it. What your work wants
is not truth, but beauty of external form, the other half of art." He
leaned almost gently toward the boy. "Skill may come in time, but you
will have to work hard. The love of beauty and the desire for it must
be born in a man; the skill to reproduce it he must make. He must work
hard."

"All my life I have longed to see you," the boy said.

The stranger broke off the end of his cigar, and lit it. The boy lifted
the heavy wood from the stranger's knee and drew yet nearer him. In
the dog-like manner of his drawing near there was something superbly
ridiculous, unless one chanced to view it in another light. Presently
the stranger said, whiffing, "Do something for me."

The boy started up.

"No; stay where you are. I don't want you to go anyowhere; I want you to
talk to me. Tell me what you have been doing all your life."

The boy slunk down again. Would that the man had asked him to root up
bushes with his hands for his horse to feed on; or to run to the far end
of the plain for the fossils that lay there, or to gather the flowers
that grew on the hills at the edge of the plain; he would have run and
been back quickly--but now!

"I have never done anything," he said.

"Then tell me of that nothing. I like to know what other folks