POTTERY
IV. THE WONDERFUL ART OF MAKING MUD PIES
Isn’t it fun to make mud pies?
You get dreadfully dirty, but no natural child minds that. Mama is apt to say that washing dishes is a much more useful thing to do. But you can tell her that if no one had ever made mud pies there would be no pretty white dishes to wash. Bricks to build houses, drain tiles, stone jugs, common dishes and the most delicate painted china cups and saucers and vases and doll-heads, were just mud pies once. They are all made of clay, ground up into flour, mixed with water, shaped and patted and baked in an oven.
You know what pretty things the little tots in the kindergarten can model in clay. All they need is clay and water and ten clever little fingers. So you can readily believe that the wildest people who lived in caves and dressed in skins, and who had no tools at all, could shape bowls and jugs that would hold water and bake them in the sun. There was nothing the people of the earth learned to make earlier except, perhaps, the weaving of baskets of reeds and grasses. Some tribes wove baskets first and lined them with unbaked clay. When they tried to cook meat or grain in these vessels the baskets, of course, were burned. But how surprised and pleased they must have been to find that the clay lining was hardened by the fire.
Then they found that these pots and bowls and jugs were apt to crack if the tiniest bit of gravel was left in the clay. And they found that some clays turned red when baked, some stayed yellow or white. They learned to pound the clay to powder, to melt it in water, to strain out all the little stones through baskets or grass sieves, to dry the melted clay, work it to a powder again, sift it, add water to make a smooth dough, shape the vessels by turning them around and around, bake them in pits, paint them and glaze them with a kind of glass. Indeed, some very simple people in many parts of the world, learned a little at a time by just having to learn, nearly all the things we know about pottery making today. The American
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