patience and loyalty beaming out of the quiet eyes.

"Who did this?" demanded the teacher.

Rembrandt hesitated, stuttered, stammered, and then confessed that he did
it himself--he could not tell a lie.

He was sure the picture would be criticized and ridiculed, but he had
decided to face it out. It was a picture of his mother, and he had
sketched her just as she looked. He would let them laugh, and then at
noon he would wait outside the door and smash the boy who laughed loudest
over the head with a wooden shoe--and let it go at that.

But the scholars did not laugh, for Jacob van Swanenburch took the boy by
the hand and leading him out before the class told those young men to
look upon their master.

From that time forth Rembrandt was regarded by the little art world of
Leyden as a prodigy.

Like William Cullen Bryant, who wrote "Thanatopsis" when scarcely
eighteen, and writing for sixty years thereafter never equaled it, or
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who wrote "The Blessed Damozel" at the same age,
Rembrandt sprang into life full-armed.

It is probably true that he could not then have produced an elaborate
composition, but his faces were Rembrandtesque from the very first.

Rembrandt is the king of light and shade. You never mistake his work. As
the years passed, around him clustered a goodly company of pupils,