All were delighted at the result of Tom's courage, and Kutchke said that Tom deserved three Iron Crosses—one for saving his life, another for capturing the standard, and another for bringing home the sabre. Tom was very popular with his comrades, and the news of his adventures soon reached the ears of the Colonel of his regiment, and he was soon afterwards informed that he was to receive the Iron Cross. The whole regiment was formed into three sides of a square, and the Colonel called out the name of Tom Rodman, who stepped forward, and stood very stiff while the Colonel asked after him and his family. Tom could not any longer conceal the fact that he was not a German, but an American boy, and the Colonel promised to say nothing about it, in order that Kutchke should not be punished. So this is how Tom Rodman joined the German army, and was the first American to wear the famous Iron Cross. The Colonel cabled to his mother in America, so that she might not be alarmed, and the Professor easily forgave his pupil for all the anxiety that Tom had caused him.
[A JAPANESE PICTURE-STORY.]
BY BARNET PHILLIPS.
he stories that have been written about pictures are to be divided into two general categories—those indicating the skill of the artist, and those relating to the performances of the pictures themselves. Both of these merge, since they attest the ability of the artist. There is a third kind of story, dwelling on the mishaps of painters, which accidents, however, in the long-run, invariably aid the artist.
The supernatural must have been called into play at the dawn of civilization, when the first artist scratched with splinter of flint an animal form on a bone. Pygmalion, who carved a woman so lifelike that he prayed to Venus to give Galatea flesh, blood, and a soul, must in an earlier form have been a story of the most remote antiquity. We find traces of this myth in Egyptian worship. To a South Sea Islander carved idols are not stocks nor stones, but living gods. The most acute Hindostanee does not separate his brazen images from the personalities of his deities.
Nothing is older than the stories of the supreme skill of the artist which the old Greek repeated. The common type of this legend is the picture with the figs painted on it, which were so natural that the birds pecked at them. The modern Orientals have embellished this story in many ways. The Persians will tell you that the birds actually carried a pomegranate out of a picture and fought over the fruit. One of the pomegranates slipped from the beak of a bird and tumbled down to a garden below. The over-ripe fruit broke, the seeds were scattered, and where they fell a pomegranate-tree grew, which will be shown you to-day in a court-yard in Ispahan.
We have the very old joke about the slab of stone painted so exactly like a log of wood that it floated. The Japanese have worked up the idea in many ingenious ways. They had a painter of the tenth century who drew a crystal ball so perfectly that when the sun shone on it, it behaved as would a lens, and would light tinder.
The Greeks tell of an artist who was dissatisfied with the flecks of foam in the mouth of the dog he was painting, and in anger threw a sponge at his picture, and, lo! where the sponge had struck the painting there was the froth required.