THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



suspended from the branches of an elm in the dooryard 

 of a family no member of which had ever heard of an 

 oriole or its song or recalled ever to have seen a bird of 

 black-and-orange plumage. 



And this half-blindness is but typical of what one 

 finds in every direction, if one analyses the observing 

 powers of one's acquaintances. I have known a woman 

 of intelligence, when asked to make the experiment of 

 sketching the profile of a face, to look intently at the sit- 

 ter and actually draw the profile facing in the wrong 

 direction. That perhaps is an extreme case, but if 

 you ask your average acquaintance to sketch almost 

 any familiar object, you will get scarcely less startling 

 results. 



Not one untrained person in ten can glance at such a 

 familiar object as, for example, a tumbler placed in 

 front of him, and depict its top with an approximately 

 correct oval. The sketcher knows that he is represent- 

 ing something that is really round and this knowledge 

 will pervert his vision. 



Again, how few untrained eyes present to their pos- 

 sessors anything like a correct picture of the lights and 

 shadows which really determine for us the character of 

 all the objects about us. Ask your friend to look in- 

 tently at a ball laid in front of him and make you the 

 simplest picture of it with three gradations of shade to 

 mark (i) the deepest shadow, (2) the medium tone, and 

 (3) the high light ; and see how ill is the service that his 

 eye does him. A very large portion of the training of 

 the art schools consists merely in teaching the eyes to 

 see. 



