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Excerpt from Short Extracts From Lucian: With Introduction and Notes He lived till the end Of the century. His parents were in humble circumstances; so that, when his school-days were over, it was decided, after a family council, that he should be put to learn a trade, in order that he might as soon as possible become self supporting.1 He was consequently apprenticed to his maternal uncle, a statuary and stone-mason, - his early aptitude for mould ing figures out of wax giving his father hope that he would soon master the art and achieve distinction therein. But this hope was doomed to speedy disappointment. The lad entered the studio with eager aspirations, but his first experience sufficed to dissipate them. He was set to polishing a slab of marble, but in his awk wardness or over - zeal hexbore on too heavily, and the slab broke under his hands. At this the hot-tempered uncle caught up a whip lying conveniently near, and gave him a rather serious 'initiation, ' as Lucian humorously says, into his new career. The boy broke away from him and ran home, sobbing and wailing, and winning the ready sympathy of his mother; who grew angry enough at her brother as the young runaway maliciously added to the narrative of his ogging, that his uncle did it out of pure envy, foreseeing already how much he would one day surpass him. The night after this adventure he sobbed himself to sleep, in bitter memory of the events of the day; and there came to him - so he fabled in after years - a wonderful vision, like that which Prodicus had imagined for the young Heracles, in which 'statuary' and 'culture' appeared before himsin bodily shape, and pleaded with persuasive eloquence their respective causes. With impulsive enthusiasm he surrendered himself to Culture, ' and with her journeyed in dream over land and sea, gaining a foretaste of the success and glory that awaited him. Although the 'dream' is only a graceful fiction, yet it is no doubt true in so far as it indicates that Lu