little maid with golden hair, followed by the great
big bear, the middle-sized bear, and the tiny bear.
Truly those stories were a great joy to us, but we
would never have loved them quite so much if we
had not known their pictured faces as well.

Do you ever wonder how all these pictures came
to be made? They had a beginning, just as everything
else had, but the beginning goes so far back
that we can scarcely trace it.

Children have not always had picture-books to
look at. In the long-ago days such things were not
known. Thousands of years ago, far away in
Assyria, the Assyrian people learned to make
pictures and to carve them out in stone. In Egypt,
too, the Egyptians traced pictures upon the walls
of their temples and upon the painted mummy-
cases of the dead. Then the Greeks made still
more beautiful statues and pictures in marble, and
called them gods and goddesses, for all this was at
a time when the true God was forgotten.

Afterwards, when Christ had come and the people
had learned that the pictured gods were not real,
they began to think it wicked to make beautiful
pictures or carve marble statues. The few pictures
that were made were stiff and ugly, the figures were
not like real men and women, the animals and trees
were very strange-looking things. And instead of