which can be shaped into definite fashion. My pupils soon came to me,
urged by this new necessity. What life requires that life provides,
wherever life is or has been; what youth requires that youth provides,
wherever youth is or has been. And what the later man's life requires
from a man, or from men in general, that also is provided by the boy's
life and the youth's life when these have been genuinely lived through.
The demand of my pupils set me upon the following question: "What did
you do as a boy? What happened to you to satisfy that need of yours for
something to do and to express? By what, at the same period of your
life, was this need most fully met, or what did you then most desire for
this purpose?" Then there came to me a memory from out my earliest
boyhood, which yielded me all I wanted in my emergency. It was the easy
art of impressing figures and forms by properly arranged simple strokes
on smooth paper.[64] I have often made use of this simple art in my
later life, and have never found it fail in its object; and on this
occasion, too, it faithfully served my pupils and me, for our skill, at
first weak both on the part of teacher and pupil, grew rapidly greater
with use.

From these forms impressed upon paper we rose to making forms out of
paper itself, and then to producing forms in paste-board, and finally in
wood. My later experience has taught me much more as to the best shapes
and materials for the study of forms,[65] of which I shall speak in its
proper place.

I must, however, permit myself to dwell a little upon this extremely
simple occupation of impressing forms on paper, because at the proper
age it quite absorbs a boy, and completely fills and contents the
demands of his faculties. Why is this? It gives the boy, easily and
spontaneously, and yet at the same time imperceptibly, precise, clear,