Life’s night rests feet which long have stood;
Some warm, soft bed, in field or wood,
The mother will not fail to keep,
Where we can lay us “down to sleep.”
—Helen Hunt Jackson.
SIR EDWIN LANDSEER
In the great South Kensington Museum in England there are many beautiful pictures, painted by famous artists. In one corner there is a little lead-pencil sketch of a donkey’s head, and visitors to the gallery used to ask the guide how it came there. The old man would point to the name below the sketch and say, “Why, that is Sir Edwin Landseer’s, and done when he was only five years old.” This is true, for the little drawing is marked, “E. Landseer, five years old.”
The little boy who did such wonderful work lived in a happy home in the great city of London. Not far from his home was a beautiful field called Hampstead Heath, and it was on this delightful playground that Edwin and his older brothers spent some of the happiest hours of their lives. While the others were burying each other in the grass, riding the old horse, or romping with the dogs, little curly-headed Edwin would be sitting under a tree, trying to make pictures. Sometimes his sister would sit by his side and watch the pencil as his baby fingers guided it. Very soon she would see a horse’s head on the paper and would recognize their own old Dobbin. “How good it is!” she would exclaim, “What a famous little artist you are!”
