The Little Fig-Tree Stories

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DREAM-HOKSES There is a little girl who hangs upon her mother's chair, getting her head between her mother's work and the light, and begs for pictures. She expects her mother to make these pictures on some bit of paper treasured for the purpose which she offers, with a book to rest it on, and a stubby pencil notched with small toothmarks, the record of moments of perplexity when Polly was making her own pictures. It is generally after a bad failure of her own that she comes to her mother. The pang of disappointment with her own efforts is apt to sharpen her temper a little; it does not make Polly more patient with her mother's mistakes that she makes mistakes herself. But between critic and artist, with such light as the dark lantern of a little girl's head permits to fall upon the paper, the picture gets made somehow, and before it is finished Polly's heart will be so full of sunshine that she will insist upon comparisons most flattering to the feelings of her artist, between their different essays at the same subject. It is a subject they are both familiar with; and it is wonderful, considering the extent of Polly's patronage, that her artist's work does not better itself. It is always a picture of a young person on horseback, ? a young person about the age of Polly, but much handsomer and more grownup looking. And the horse must be a pony with a flowing mane and tail, and his legs must be flung out, fore and aft, so that in action he resembles one of those " crazy-bugs " (so we children used to call them) that go scuttling like mad things across the still surface of a pond. In other respects he may be as like an ordinary pony as mamma and the stubby pencil can make him. But the young person on the pony must be drawn in profile, because Polly cannot make profiles...