Saucers and bowls and plates and many, many articles are molded over plaster of paris shapes. For a plate or saucer a sheet of clay, like a rolled piecrust, is pressed on a mould and smoothed on a whirling table by shaped metal scrapers. In making teacups the moulds are lined, as mama lines little patty pans for tarts. The potter smoothes the inside, first with his hand, then with a wet sponge. Handles and spouts are shaped separately and pasted on with a clay cement.

These shapes of clay are set on boards in rows and dried, as you set your little mud pies in the sun. In very old times, and in countries where there was little rain, as in Egypt and on our Western deserts where the Pueblo Indians lived, the people used just sun-dried bricks to build their houses. But they found that water jars must be baked in a fire. All stone ware and the whitest porcelain are baked today in great kilns or fire-clay ovens, and cooled there slowly by drawing the fire so they will not crack easily. You know that cooling or heating suddenly cracks glass and china.

After baking and cooling, pottery is glazed with a kind of glass. Some of the pieces are decorated before glazing, some after, by printing colored or gold bands or flowers on them, or by painting with metal powders and oils. Then it is baked again. With that glass skin on it, sun, wind and dust cannot mar the most delicate porcelain vase or cup. It is such a pity that so beautiful a thing, that it. has taken so much work and skill to make, can be broken so easily by a careless person.

In many museums in our country and in the old world you may see the earliest Indian, Egyptian and other primitive, unglazed pottery of strong colors, and quaintly shaped and ornamented. And you may see the most exquisite Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Dutch, French, English, German and American art wares. For hundreds of years many peoples have been making pottery and porcelain too beautiful and costly for anything except to look at, as we look at paintings and statues. The clays were mixed, shaped, fired, painted, enamelled, polished, glazed and fired again by great artists. The finest examples are marked with the makers' names burned in. And oh, what hero stories there are of famous potters, who worked years, and failed and suffered and at last succeeded in this lovely art.

Pottery making is one of the few things very little children can do, and do well. In its simplest forms it needs as cheap materials, and as few tools as basket making. Modeling clay comes among school supplies ready for use, too. In many places are kilns where schools can have pottery fired. And there are models of very old, simply shaped pieces to copy, and old patterns of ornament that grew out of the lives of ancient peoples. So as you shape and paint and dry the jar or bowl or vase, you live again the history of the earliest workers in clay, and learn principles of form and ornament that are used in many arts.

That kind of playing mud pies is useful and beautiful. Anyone can wash a dish after it is made, but just ask mama to read this story and then say if she thinks she could make a dish. (See Pottery, Palissy, Wedgwood.)