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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Children, by Alice Meynell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Children
+
+Author: Alice Meynell
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2005  [eBook #2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1911 John Lane edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN
+
+
+Contents
+
+Fellow Travellers with a Bird, I.
+Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II.
+Children in Midwinter
+That Pretty Person
+Out of Town
+Expression
+Under the Early Stars
+The Man with Two Heads
+Children in Burlesque
+Authorship
+Letters
+The Fields
+The Barren Shore
+The Boy
+Illness
+The Young Children
+Fair and Brown
+Real Childhood
+
+
+
+
+FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, I.
+
+
+To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed
+of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the pre-occupations.  You
+cannot anticipate him.  Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not
+compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike.  Not the tone, but
+the note alters.  So with the uncovenated ways of a child you keep no
+tryst.  They meet you at another place, after failing you where you
+tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault.  You are
+the fellow traveller of a bird.  The bird alights and escapes out of time
+to your footing.
+
+No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four
+years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and
+unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls."
+A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights
+and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was a
+dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be a
+lady frog."  None ever said their good things before these indeliberate
+authors.  Even their own kind--children--have not preceded them.  No
+child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose
+father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different,
+perverse, and unforeseen success.  He was rather tired with writing, and
+had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies.
+"Do you know, I have been working hard, darling?  I work to buy things
+for you."  "Do you work," she asked, "to buy the lovely puddin's?"  Yes,
+even for these.  The subject must have seemed to her to be worth
+pursuing.  "And do you work to buy the fat?  I don't like fat."
+
+The sympathies, nevertheless, are there.  The same child was to be
+soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned in
+the Kensington Round Pond.  It was suggested to her that she should
+forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject--her
+wishes.  "Do you know," she said, without loss of time, "what I should
+like best in all the world?  A thundred dolls and a whistle!"  Her mother
+was so overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offer
+as to the dolls.  But the whistle seemed practicable.  "It is for me to
+whistle for cabs," said the child, with a sudden moderation, "when I go
+to parties."  Another morning she came down radiant, "Did you hear a
+great noise in the miggle of the night?  That was me crying.  I cried
+because I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into his
+nose."
+
+The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no, nothing
+feminine--in this adult world.  "I've got a lotter than you," is the word
+of a very young egotist.  An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern't
+I, mother?"  He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "the
+backy-garden."  A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder at
+luncheon--at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am the
+favourite of the crust."  Moreover, if an author set himself to invent
+the naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home,
+he would hardly light upon the device of the little _troupe_ who, having
+no footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of--candle-shades!
+
+"It's _jolly_ dull without you, mother," says a little girl who--gentlest
+of the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes no
+secret.  But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats of
+metathesis, about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the
+"stand-wash," the "sweeping-crosser," the "sewing chamine."  Genoese
+peasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.
+
+Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they should
+by any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually.  A
+London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her
+pointing finger, and names it "bird."  Her brother, who wants to play
+with a bronze Japanese lobster, ask "Will you please let me have that
+tiger?"
+
+At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the most
+touching kind of newness.  Thus, a child of three asks you to save him.
+How moving a word, and how freshly said!  He had heard of the "saving" of
+other things of interest--especially chocolate creams taken for
+safe-keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me to-day?  Nurse is
+going out, will you save me, mother?"  The same little variant upon
+common use is in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help in
+the arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at your ease."
+
+A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, was
+taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from
+her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer.  As
+he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she
+noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they
+might be those of the _fournisseurs_ of her friend.  "That is his bread
+shop, and that is his book shop.  And that, mother," she said finally,
+with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming _parterre_ of
+confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose,
+is where he buys his sugar pigs."
+
+In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intent
+upon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector.  We have all
+heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collecting
+cocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs her
+nothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names over all
+shop-windows.  No hoard was ever lighter than hers.  "I began three weeks
+ago next Monday, mother," she says with precision, "and I have got thirty-
+nine."  "Thirty-nine what?"  "Smiths."
+
+
+
+
+FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, II.
+
+
+The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collecting
+together a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of their
+kind.  In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the
+rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported
+them.  They do not, for example, say "me is;" their natural reply to "are
+you?" is "I are."  One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have
+nothing but the nominative pronoun.  "Lift I up and let I see it
+raining," she bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes, "Lift I up
+and let I see it not raining."
+
+An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered for
+her by maternal authority.  She wore the garments under protest, and with
+some resentment.  At the same time it was evident that she took no
+pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend.  He
+had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and the
+decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"a
+brown tress."  She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and
+she silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of
+Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy.  The
+unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn.  She had a phrase
+for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable.  "That," she said more
+or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."
+
+The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years
+of mere learning to speak.  The young child now takes a current word into
+use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the
+interruption of a pause for search.  I have certainly detected, in
+children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of
+their own making is as good a communication as another, and as
+intelligible.  There is even a general implicit conviction among them
+that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion
+befalls.  How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings
+forward some hitherto unheard?  The child would be surprised to know how
+irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to
+belong to the common world.
+
+There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a
+child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much
+confidence in the chances of the hedge.  He goes free, a simple
+adventurer.  Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything
+strange or particularly expressive or descriptive.  The child trusts
+genially to his hearer.  A very young boy, excited by his first sight of
+sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing
+himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets."  This was
+simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little
+older.  "Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said;
+and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration,
+answered, "because they are so big."  There seemed to be no further
+question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged
+with meaning.
+
+To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat
+at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express
+a meaning well realized--a personal matter.  Questioned as to the eating
+of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I
+took them just to appetize my hunger."  As she betrayed a familiar
+knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked
+whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on
+their way from school.  "I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed;
+"but I generally speculate outside."
+
+Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with
+something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation.  Dryden
+does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages.  But
+sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders.
+Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems,
+allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with
+something of her own writing.  The child has a full and gay sense of the
+sweetest kinds of irony.  There was no need for her to write, she and her
+mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy
+of a pen:--"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that
+article, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt.  Such a
+unletterary article.  I cannot call it letterature.  I hope you will not
+write any more such unconventionan trash."
+
+This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister,
+and thought her forward for her age: "I wish people knew just how old she
+is, mother, then they would know she is onward.  They can see she is
+pretty, but they can't know she is such a onward baby."
+
+Thus speak the naturally unreluctant; but there are other children who in
+time betray a little consciousness and a slight _mefiance_ as to where
+the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure.  These
+children may not be shy enough to suffer any self-checking in their talk,
+but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word of which they do
+not feel too sure.  A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enough
+to cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cup
+of tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feigned
+indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the
+infusion."  "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and
+then, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?"  She was not
+told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh.  The afternoon cup
+left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"
+thenceforward.
+
+
+
+
+CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER
+
+
+Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise to
+see them blooming in winter.  Their tenderness, their down, their colour,
+their fulness--which is like that of a thick rose or of a tight
+grape--look out of season.  Children in the withering wind are like the
+soft golden-pink roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathing
+a southern calm on the north wind.  The child has something better than
+warmth in the cold, something more subtly out of place and more
+delicately contrary; and that is coolness.  To be cool in the cold is the
+sign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien from the common conditions of
+the world.  It is to have a naturally, and not an artificially, different
+and separate climate.
+
+We can all be more or less warm--with fur, with skating, with tea, with
+fire, and with sleep--in the winter.  But the child is fresh in the wind,
+and wakes cool from his dreams, dewy when there is hoar-frost everywhere
+else; he is "more lovely and more temperate" than the summer day and than
+the winter day alike.  He overcomes both heat and cold by another
+climate, which is the climate of life; but that victory of life is more
+delicate and more surprising in the tyranny of January.  By the sight and
+the touch of children, we are, as it were, indulged with something finer
+than a fruit or a flower in untimely bloom.  The childish bloom is always
+untimely.  The fruit and flower will be common later on; the strawberries
+will be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus dull in its day.  But
+a child is a perpetual _primeur_.
+
+Or rather he is not in truth always untimely.  Some few days in the year
+are his own season--unnoticed days of March or April, soft, fresh and
+equal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun.  Then he looks as
+though he had his brief season, and ceases for a while to seem strange.
+
+It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to
+children; their likeness is so rife among annuals.  For man and woman we
+are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously
+their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without
+renewel, without refrain.  But it is by an intelligible illusion that we
+look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children--for a
+waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall
+not be final, shall not be fatal.  But every winter shows us how human
+they are, and how they are little pilgrims and visitants among the things
+that look like their kin.  For every winter shows them free from the east
+wind; more perfectly than their elders, they enclose the climate of life.
+And, moreover, with them the climate of life is the climate of the spring
+of life; the climate of a human March that is sure to make a constant
+progress, and of a human April that never hesitates.  The child "breathes
+April and May"--an inner April and his own May.
+
+The winter child looks so much the more beautiful for the season as his
+most brilliant uncles and aunts look less well.  He is tender and gay in
+the east wind.  Now more than ever must the lover beware of making a
+comparison between the beauty of the admired woman and the beauty of a
+child.  He is indeed too wary ever to make it.  So is the poet.  As
+comparisons are necessary to him, he will pay a frankly impossible
+homage, and compare a woman's face to something too fine, to something it
+never could emulate.  The Elizabethan lyrist is safe among lilies and
+cherries, roses, pearls, and snow.  He undertakes the beautiful office of
+flattery, and flatters with courage.  There is no hidden reproach in the
+praise.  Pearls and snow suffer, in a sham fight, a mimic defeat that
+does them no harm, and no harm comes to the lady's beauty from a
+competition so impossible.  She never wore a lily or a coral in the
+colours of her face, and their beauty is not hers.  But here is the
+secret: she is compared with a flower because she could not endure to be
+compared with a child.  That would touch her too nearly.  There would be
+the human texture and the life like hers, but immeasurably more lovely.
+No colour, no surface, no eyes of woman have ever been comparable with
+the colour, the surface, and the eyes of childhood.  And no poet has ever
+run the risk of such a defeat.  Why, it is defeat enough for a woman to
+have her face, however well-favoured, close to a child's, even if there
+is no one by who should be rash enough to approach them still nearer by a
+comparison.
+
+This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than that
+beauty of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred,
+and which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily.  There
+are, indeed, other adult beauties, but those are such as make no
+allusions to the garden.  What is here affirmed is that the beautiful
+woman who is widely and wisely likened to the flowers, which are
+inaccessibly more beautiful, must not, for her own sake, be likened to
+the always accessible child.
+
+Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is much
+beyond that of more finished years.  This gratuitous addition, this
+completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages.  Their beauty of
+finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as years
+are added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection.  A
+bloom disappears, for instance.  In some little children the whole face,
+and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and the
+growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft as
+bloom.  Look then at the eyebrows themselves.  Their line is as definite
+as in later life, but there is in the child the flush given by the
+exceeding fineness of the delicate hairs.  Moreover, what becomes,
+afterwards, of the length and the curl of the eyelash?  What is there in
+growing up that is destructive of a finish so charming as this?
+
+Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face "from the right or
+from the left" when her portrait was a-painting.  She was an observant
+woman, and liked to be lighted from the front.  It is a light from the
+right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows.
+And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing
+and parting caress that infancy has given to his face.  The down will
+then be found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red of
+his cheek.  His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not
+much harder than petals.
+
+To return to the child in January.  It is his month for the laying up of
+dreams.  No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even with
+a majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs now
+and then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a charm
+and glory mingled with uncertain dreams.  Never forgotten, and yet never
+certainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening.  When
+many and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there never
+was any kind of doubt, has been long forgotten, that evening--as to which
+all is doubt--is impossible to forget.  In a few years it has become so
+remote that the history of Greece derives antiquity from it.  In later
+years it is still doubtful, still a legend.
+
+The child never asked how much was fact.  It was always so immeasurably
+long ago that the sweet party happened--if indeed it happened.  It had so
+long taken its place in that past wherein lurks all the antiquity of the
+world.  No one would know, no one could tell him, precisely what
+occurred.  And who can know whether--if it be indeed a dream--he has
+dreamt it often, or has dreamt once that he had dreamt it often?  That
+dubious night is entangled in repeated visions during the lonely life a
+child lives in sleep; it is intricate with illusions.  It becomes the
+most mysterious and the least worldly of all memories, a spiritual past.
+The word pleasure is too trivial for such a remembrance.  A midwinter
+long gone by contained the suggestion of such dreams; and the midwinter
+of this year must doubtless be preparing for the heart of many an ardent
+young child a like legend and a like antiquity.  For the old it is a mere
+present.
+
+
+
+
+THAT PRETTY PERSON
+
+
+During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one
+significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
+controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an
+interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts.  This
+is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of
+process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of
+progress.  With this is a resignation to change, and something more than
+resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their
+transitoriness.
+
+What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world,
+for childhood?  Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for
+the sake of its mere promise of manhood.  We do not now hold, perhaps,
+that promise so high.  Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should
+acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.
+
+But it was not so once.  As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a
+patient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred years
+ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full stature
+of body and mind.  The Indian woman sings of the future hunting.  If her
+song is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results of
+time, and has submitted her heart to experience.  Childhood is a time of
+danger; "Would it were done."  But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put
+it to sleep and guard its slumbers.  It will pass.  She sings prophecies
+to the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she
+spins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn.  She bids good speed.
+
+John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive.  His child--"that
+pretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was chiefly
+precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man he
+never lived to be.  The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead,
+says of him: "At two and a half years of age he pronounced English,
+Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three
+languages."  As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at
+that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the
+entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make
+congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and _vice versa_, construe
+and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives,
+verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a
+considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' and had a strong passion for
+Greek."
+
+Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not
+to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is the
+very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty
+times.  All being favorable, the child of Evelyn's studious home would
+have done all these things in the course of nature within a few years.  It
+was the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, to
+Evelyn, so exquisite.  The course of nature had not any beauty in his
+eyes.  It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was not
+admired for the majesty of its unhasting process.  Jeremy Taylor mourns
+with him "the strangely hopeful child," who--without Comenius's "Janua"
+and without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known it, an
+appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and
+closing a separate expectation every day of his five years.
+
+Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering
+to the estate of man.  They thought their little boy strangely hopeful
+because he was so quick on his way to be something else.  They lost the
+timely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes.  And
+yet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!
+
+It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, must
+rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not slighting
+it, or bidding it hasten its work, nor yet hailing it, with Faust, "Stay,
+thou art so fair!"  Childhood is but change made gay and visible, and the
+world has lately been converted to change.
+
+Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the
+act.  To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal,
+and every goal a passage.  The hours are equal; but some of them wear
+apparent wings.
+
+_Tout passe_.  Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the
+fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and
+contain?  It seems as though our forefathers had answered this question
+most arbitrarily as to the life of man.
+
+All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, this
+suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time of
+fulfilment.  The way was without rest to them.  And this because they had
+the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this unpausing
+life.
+
+Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as
+might be, if not sooner.  When a poor little boy came to be eight years
+old they called him a youth.  The diarist himself had no cause to be
+proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by
+an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments"
+till he was four years of age.  He seems even to have been a youth of
+eight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in
+after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of,
+and hardly acknowledges.  It is difficult to imagine what childhood must
+have been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything
+that was proper to five years old was defect.  A strange good conceit of
+themselves and of their own ages had those fathers.
+
+They took their children seriously, without relief.  Evelyn has nothing
+to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it.  Twice are
+children, not his own, mentioned in his diary.  Once he goes to the
+wedding of a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently,
+an occasion of sensibility.  Another time he stands by, in a French
+hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a
+frightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience."  "The use I
+made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been
+subject to this deplorable infirmitie."  This is what he says.
+
+See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
+literature, and how it abolished little girls.  It may be that there were
+in all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon being
+children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal.  Art, for
+example, had no little girls.  There was always Cupid, and there were the
+prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his
+little brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might be
+called Tommy.  But there were no "little radiant girls."  Now and then an
+"Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always a
+matter of sewing and reading.  As for the little girl saints, even when
+they were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slipped
+through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate
+suitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval
+mind, but mars them for ours.
+
+So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat
+hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most
+admirable Mrs. Godolphin.  She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in the
+Court of Charles II.  She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "who
+passed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the least
+stain or tincture in her christall."  She held her state with men and
+maids for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as that
+of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instruction
+to the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might give
+the least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there did
+usually assume," refused the addresses of the "greatest persons," and was
+as famous for her beauty as for her wit.  One would like to forget the
+age at which she did these things.  When she began her service she was
+eleven.  When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she was
+not thirteen.
+
+Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and
+heroines, therefore, were of those ages.  The poets turned April into
+May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if they
+shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs.  The particular
+year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say a
+fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and
+ellipses, figures, and tropes.  Even as late as Keats a poet would not
+have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimely
+flowers.  The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as he
+has it.
+
+The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old.  His fear of
+losing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper with the
+bloom of their childhood.  The young heiress of seventeen in the
+_Spectator_ has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last six
+years."  The famous letter describing the figure, the dance, the wit, the
+stockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed to be written by a girl
+of thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can."  She
+adds, "I have a good portion which they cannot hinder me of."  This
+correspondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they have
+bought their wedding clothes."  There was no sense of childhood in an age
+that could think this an opportune pleasantry.
+
+But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later
+century--an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and all
+things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its
+appointed end.  It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than a
+sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children to seem,
+at last, something else than a defect.
+
+
+
+
+OUT OF TOWN
+
+
+To be on a _villeggiatura_ with the children is to surprise them in ways
+and words not always evident in the London house.  The narrow lodgings
+cause you to hear and overhear.  Nothing is more curious to listen to
+than a young child's dramatic voice.  The child, being a boy, assumes a
+deep, strong, and ultra-masculine note, and a swagger in his walk, and
+gives himself the name of the tallest of his father's friends.  The tone
+is not only manly; it is a tone of affairs, and withal careless; it is
+intended to suggest business, and also the possession of a top-hat and a
+pipe, and is known in the family of the child as his "official voice."
+One day it became more official than ever, and really more masculine than
+life; and it alternated with his own tones of three years old.  In these,
+he asked with humility, "Will you let me go to heaven if I'm naughty?
+Will you?"  Then he gave the reply in the tone of affairs, the official
+voice at its very best: "No, little boy, I won't!"  It was evident that
+the infant was not assuming the character of his father's tallest friend
+this time, but had taken a role more exalted.  His little sister of a
+year older seemed thoroughly to enjoy the humour of the situation.
+"Listen to him, mother.  He's trying to talk like God.  He often does."
+
+Bulls are made by a less imaginative child who likes to find some reason
+for things--a girl.  Out at the work of picking blackberries, she
+explains, "Those rather good ones were all bad, mother, so I ate them."
+Being afraid of dogs, this little girl of four years old has all kinds of
+dodges to disguise her fear, which she has evidently resolved to keep to
+herself.  She will set up a sudden song to distract attention from the
+fact that she is placing herself out of the dog's way, and she will
+pretend to turn to gather a flower, while she watches the creature out of
+sight.  On the other hand, prudence in regard to carts and bicycles is
+openly displayed, and the infants are zealous to warn one another.  A
+rider and his horse are called briefly "a norseback."
+
+Children, who see more things than they have names for, show a fine
+courage in taking any words that seem likely to serve them, without
+wasting time in asking for the word in use.  This enterprise is most
+active at three and four years, when children have more than they can
+say.  So a child of those years running to pick up horse-chestnuts, for
+him a new species, calls after his mother a full description of what he
+has found, naming the things indifferently "dough-nuts" and "cocoa-nuts."
+And another, having an anecdote to tell concerning the Thames and a
+little brook that joins it near the house, calls the first the "front-
+sea" and the second the "back-sea."  There is no intention of taking
+liberties with the names of things--only a cheerful resolve to go on in
+spite of obstacles.  It is such a spirit of liberty as most of us have
+felt when we have dreamt of improvising a song or improvising a dance.
+The child improvises with such means as he has.
+
+This is, of course, at the very early ages.  A little later--at eight or
+nine--there is a very clear-headed sense of the value of words.  So that
+a little girl of that age, told that she may buy some fruit, and wishing
+to know her limits in spending, asks, "What mustn't it be more than?"  For
+a child, who has not the word "maximum" at hand, nothing could be more
+precise and concise.  Still later, there is a sweet brevity that looks
+almost like conscious expression, as when a boy writes from his first
+boarding school: "Whenever I can't stop laughing I have only to think of
+home."
+
+Infinitely different as children are, they differ in nothing more than in
+the degree of generosity.  The most sensitive of children is a little gay
+girl whose feelings are hurt with the greatest facility, and who seems,
+indeed, to have the susceptibilty of other ages as well as of her own--for
+instance, she cannot endure without a flush of pain to hear herself
+called fat.  But she always brings her little wound to him who has
+wounded her.  The first confidant she seeks is the offender.  If you have
+laughed at her she will not hide her tears elsewhere than on your
+shoulder.  She confesses by her exquisite action at one her poor vanity
+and her humility.
+
+The worst of children in the country is their inveterate impulse to use
+death as their toy.  Immediately on their discovery of some pretty
+insect, one tender child calls to the other "Dead it."
+
+Children do not look at the sky unless it is suggested to them to do so.
+When the sun dips to the narrow horizon of their stature, and comes to
+the level of their eyes, even then they are not greatly interested.
+Enormous clouds, erect, with the sun behind, do not gain their eyes.  What
+is of annual interest is the dark.  Having fallen asleep all the summer
+by daylight, and having awakened after sunrise, children find a stimulus
+of fun and fear in the autumn darkness outside the windows.  There is a
+frolic with the unknown blackness, with the reflections, and with the
+country night.
+
+
+
+
+EXPRESSION
+
+
+Strange to say, the eyes of children, whose minds are so small, express
+intelligence better than do the greater number of adult eyes.  David
+Garrick's were evidently unpreoccupied, like theirs.  The look of
+intelligence is outward--frankly directed upon external things; it is
+observant, and therefore mobile without inner restlessness.  For restless
+eyes are the least observant of all--they move by a kind of distraction.
+The looks of observant eyes, moving with the living things they keep in
+sight, have many pauses as well as flights.  This is the action of
+intelligence, whereas the eyes of intellect are detained or darkened.
+
+Rational perception, with all its phases of humour, are best expressed by
+a child, who has few second thoughts to divide the image of his momentary
+feeling.  His simplicity adds much to the manifestation of his
+intelligence.  The child is the last and lowest of rational creatures,
+for in him the "rational soul" closes its long downward flight with the
+bright final revelation.
+
+He has also the chief beauty of the irrational soul of the mind, that is,
+of the lower animal--which is singleness.  The simplicity, the integrity,
+the one thing at a time, of a good animal's eyes is a great beauty, and
+is apt to cause us to exaggerate our sense of their expressiveness.  An
+animal's eyes, at their best, are very slightly expressive; languor or
+alertness, the quick expectation, even the aloofness of doubt they are
+able to show, but the showing is mechanical; the human sentiment of the
+spectator adds the rest.
+
+All this simplicity the child has, at moments, with the divisions and
+delicacies of the rational soul, also.  His looks express the first, the
+last, and the clearest humanity.  He is the first by his youth and the
+last by his lowliness.  He is the beginning and the result of the
+creation of man.
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE EARLY STARS
+
+
+Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random.
+There is a tide in the affairs of children.  Civilization is cruel in
+sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.  Summer dusk,
+especially, is the frolic moment for children, baffle them how you may.
+They may have been in a pottering mood all day, intent upon all kinds of
+close industries, breathing hard over choppings and poundings.  But when
+late twilight comes, there comes also the punctual wildness.  The
+children will run and pursue, and laugh for the mere movement--it does so
+jog their spirits.
+
+What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatory
+dark?  The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths and
+crickets in the grass.  It comes like an imp, leaping on all fours.  The
+children lie in ambush and fall upon one another in the mimicry of
+hunting.
+
+The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and a
+rebellion.  Their entertainers are tired, and the children are to go
+home.  But, with more or less of life and fire, they strike some blow for
+liberty.  It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual child, or the
+stroke of the conqueror; but something, something is done for freedom
+under the early stars.
+
+This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict with
+the weariness of men.  But it is less tolerable that the energy of men
+should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at some
+time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of the
+poor.
+
+Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved by
+children.  Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to beguile the
+time.  One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another to
+play.  "Oh come," she said, "and play with me at new maid."
+
+The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable hour.
+It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits.  The habit of
+prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity of
+some customs in mankind.  But if the enquirers who appeal to that
+beginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek no
+further.  See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in their
+thralldom.  Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction of
+their high antiquity weakens your hand.
+
+Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense of
+mystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby.  The French sleep-
+song is the most romantic.  There is in it such a sound of history as
+must inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of the
+incalculable; and the songs themselves are old.  _Le Bon Roi
+Dagobert_ has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh.
+The nurse knows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she
+herself slept to when a child.  The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in
+_Le Pont a' Avignon_, is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the
+_tete a tete of_ child and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered
+rooms at night.  _Malbrook_ would be comparatively modern, were not all
+things that are sung to a drowsing child as distant as the day of
+Abraham.
+
+If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some of
+them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs.  The affectionate races
+that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the white
+child.  Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropical
+night.  His closing eyes are filled with alien images.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS
+
+
+It is generally understood in the family that the nurse who menaces a
+child, whether with the supernatural or with simple sweeps, lions, or
+tigers--goes.  The rule is a right one, for the appeal to fear may
+possibly hurt a child; nevertheless, it oftener fails to hurt him.  If he
+is prone to fears, he will be helpless under their grasp, without the
+help of human tales.  The night will threaten him, the shadow will
+pursue, the dream will catch him; terror itself have him by the heart.
+And terror, having made his pulses leap, knows how to use any thought,
+any shape, any image, to account to the child's mind for the flight and
+tempest of his blood.  "The child shall not be frightened," decrees
+ineffectual love; but though no man make him afraid, he is frightened.
+Fear knows him well and finds him alone.
+
+Such a child is hardly at the mercy of any human rashness and impatience;
+nor is the child whose pulses go steadily, and whose brows are fresh and
+cool, at their mercy.  This is one of the points upon which a healthy
+child resembles the Japanese.  Whatever that extreme Oriental may be in
+war and diplomacy, whatever he may be at London University, or whatever
+his plans of Empire, in relation to the unseen world he is a child at
+play.  He hides himself, he hides his eyes and pretends to believe that
+he is hiding, he runs from the supernatural and laughs for the fun of
+running.
+
+So did a child, threatened for his unruliness with the revelation of the
+man with two heads.  The nurse must have had recourse to this man under
+acute provocation.  The boy, who had profited well by every one of his
+four long years, and was radiant with the light and colour of health,
+refused to be left to compose himself to sleep.  That act is an adult
+act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life,
+when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of setting
+forth.  But the child is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught,
+surprised, and overcome.  He goes no more to sleep, than he takes a
+"constitutional" with his hoop and hoopstick.  The child amuses himself
+up to the last of his waking moments.  Happily, in the search for
+amusement, he is apt to learn some habit or to cherish some toy, either
+of which may betray him and deliver him up to sleep, the enemy.  What
+wonder, then, if a child who knows that everyone in the world desires his
+peace and pleasure, should clamour for companionship in the first
+reluctant minutes of bed?  This child, being happy, did not weep for what
+he wanted; he shouted for it in the rousing tones of his strength.  After
+many evenings of this he was told that this was precisely the vociferous
+kind of wakefulness that might cause the man with two heads to show
+himself.
+
+Unable to explain that no child ever goes to sleep, but that sleep, on
+the contrary, "goes" for a child, the little boy yet accepted the
+penalty, believed in the man, and kept quiet for a time.
+
+There was indignation in the mother's heart when the child instructed her
+as to what might be looked for at his bedside; she used all her emphasis
+in assuring him that no man with two heads would ever trouble those
+innocent eyes, for there was no such portent anywhere on earth.  There is
+no such heart-oppressing task as the making of these assurances to a
+child, for whom who knows what portents are actually in wait!  She found
+him, however, cowering with laughter, not with dread, lest the man with
+two heads should see or overhear.  The man with two heads had become his
+play, and so was perhaps bringing about his sleep by gentler means than
+the nurse had intended.  The man was employing the vacant minutes of the
+little creature's flight from sleep, called "going to sleep" in the
+inexact language of the old.
+
+Nor would the boy give up his faith with its tremor and private laughter.
+Because a child has a place for everything, this boy had placed the
+monstrous man in the ceiling, in a corner of the room that might be kept
+out of sight by the bed curtain.  If that corner were left uncovered, the
+fear would grow stronger than the fun; "the man would see me," said the
+little boy.  But let the curtain be in position, and the child lay alone,
+hugging the dear belief that the monster was near.
+
+He was earnest in controversy with his mother as to the existence of his
+man.  The man was there, for he had been told so, and he was there to
+wait for "naughty boys," said the child, with cheerful self-condemnation.
+The little boy's voice was somewhat hushed, because of the four ears of
+the listener, but it did not falter, except when his mother's arguments
+against the existence of the man seemed to him cogent and likely to gain
+the day.  Then for the first time the boy was a little downcast, and the
+light of mystery became dimmer in his gay eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHILDREN IN BURLESQUE
+
+
+Derision, which is so great a part of human comedy, has not spared the
+humours of children.  Yet they are fitter subjects for any other kind of
+jesting.  In the first place they are quite defenceless, but besides and
+before this, it might have been supposed that nothing in a child could
+provoke the equal passion of scorn.  Between confessed unequals scorn is
+not even suggested.  Its derisive proclamation of inequality has no sting
+and no meaning where inequality is natural and manifest.
+
+Children rouse the laughter of men and women; but in all that laughter
+the tone of derision is more strange a discord than the tone of anger
+would be, or the tone of theological anger and menace.  These, little
+children have had to bear in their day, but in the grim and serious
+moods--not in the play--of their elders.  The wonder is that children
+should ever have been burlesqued, or held to be fit subjects for irony.
+
+Whether the thing has been done anywhere out of England, in any form,
+might be a point for enquiry.  It would seem, at a glance, that English
+art and literature are quite alone in this incredible manner of sport.
+
+And even here, too, the thing that is laughed at in a child is probably
+always a mere reflection of the parents' vulgarity.  None the less it is
+an unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity of father or
+mother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable resentment
+of derision.
+
+John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn that
+was not angry, but familiar.  It is true that the poor child had first
+been burlesqued by the unchildish aspect imposed upon him by his dress,
+which presented him, without the beauties of art or nature, to all the
+unnatural ironies.  Leech did but finish him in the same spirit, with
+dots for the childish eyes, and a certain form of face which is best
+described as a fat square containing two circles--the inordinate cheeks
+of that ignominious baby.  That is the child as _Punch_ in Leech's day
+preserved him, the latest figure of the then prevailing domestic raillery
+of the domestic.
+
+In like manner did Thackeray and Dickens, despite all their sentiment.
+Children were made to serve both the sentiment and the irony between
+which those two writers, alike in this, stood double-minded.  Thackeray,
+writing of his snobs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse snob
+than his snob-child.  There are snob-children not only in the book
+dedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels.  There is a
+female snob-child in "Lovel the Widower," who may be taken as a type, and
+there are snob-children at frequent intervals in "Philip."  It is not
+certain that Thackeray intended the children of Pendennis himself to be
+innocent and exempt.
+
+In one of Dickens's early sketches there is a plot amongst the humorous
+_dramatis personae_, to avenge themselves on a little boy for the lack
+of tact whereby his parents have brought him with them to a party on the
+river.  The principal humorist frightens the child into convulsions.  The
+incident is the success of the day, and is obviously intended to have
+some kind of reflex action in amusing the reader.  In Dickens's maturer
+books the burlesque little girl imitates her mother's illusory fainting-
+fits.
+
+Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque.
+A little girl in _Punch_ improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with
+the maids.  An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from
+some hideous terror.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHORSHIP
+
+
+Authorship prevails in nurseries--at least in some nurseries.  In many it
+is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has
+not been a large family without its magazine.  The weak point of all this
+literature is its commonplace.  The child's effort is to write something
+as much like as possible to the tedious books that are read to him; he is
+apt to be fluent and foolish.  If a child simple enough to imitate were
+also simple enough not to imitate he might write nursery magazines that
+would not bore us.
+
+As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageous
+spelling to make his stories go.  "He," however, is hardly the pronoun.
+The girls are the more active authors, and the more prosaic.  What they
+would write had they never read things written for them by the dull, it
+is not possible to know.  What they do write is this--to take a passage:
+"Poor Mrs. Bald (that was her name) thought she would never get to the
+wood where her aunt lived, she got down and pulled the donky on by the
+bridal . . . Alas! her troubles were not over yet, the donky would not go
+where she wanted it, instead of turning down Rose Lane it went down
+another, which although Mrs. Bald did not know it led to a very deep and
+dangerous pond.  The donky ran into the pond and Mrs. Bald was dround."
+
+To give a prosperous look to the magazine containing the serial story
+just quoted, a few pages of mixed advertisements are laboriously written
+out: "The Imatation of Christ is the best book in all the world."  "Read
+Thompson's poetry and you are in a world of delight."  "Barrat's ginger
+beer is the only ginger beer to drink."  "The place for a ice."  Under
+the indefinite heading "A Article," readers are told "that they are
+liable to read the paper for nothing."
+
+A still younger hand contributes a short story in which the hero returns
+to his home after a report of his death had been believed by his wife and
+family.  The last sentence is worth quoting: "We will now," says the
+author, "leave Mrs. White and her two children to enjoy the sudden
+appearance of Mr. White."
+
+Here is an editorial announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, every week at
+the end of the paper there will be a little article on the habits of the
+paper."
+
+On the whole, authorship does not seem to foster the quality of
+imagination.  Convention, during certain early years, may be a very
+strong motive--not so much with children brought up strictly within its
+limits, perhaps, as with those who have had an exceptional freedom.
+Against this, as a kind of childish bohemianism, there is, in one phase
+of childhood, a strong reaction.  To one child, brought up
+internationally, and with somewhat too much liberty amongst peasant play-
+mates and their games, in many dialects, eagerness to become like "other
+people," and even like the other people of quite inferior fiction, grew
+to be almost a passion.  The desire was in time out-grown, but it cost
+the girl some years of her simplicity.  The style is not always the
+child.
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS
+
+
+The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody
+has sent him a box of chocolates.  The thanks tend to stiffen a child's
+style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden
+self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know.  They speak
+prose and know it.  But a young child possesses his words by a different
+tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he
+says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them.  He is so
+little taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches the
+first that comes at random.  A little child to whom a peach was first
+revealed, whispered to his mother, "I like that kind of turnip."
+Compelled to write a letter, the child finds the word of daily life
+suddenly a stranger.
+
+The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers
+the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting.  Dickens, who
+used his eyes, remarked the contrast.  The hand of a child and his face
+are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard.
+
+His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony.  The child
+chatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there is no
+inspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom he
+probably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of anyone,
+however vague and forgotten, without a mental image.  As like as not he
+pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut.  No boy
+wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut.
+His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under these
+discouragements, but to write to her in an artless and childlike fashion.
+
+The child is unwieldy of thought, besides.  He cannot send the
+conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "I
+send them their love," "They sent me my love," "I kissed their hand to
+me."  If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a
+long effort.  His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician who
+cannot remember whether he began his sentence with "people" in the
+singular or the plural, and who finishes it otherwise than as he began
+it.  Points of grammar that are purely points of logic baffle a child
+completely.  He is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is in
+the use of his senses.
+
+It is not true--though it is generally said--that a young child's senses
+are quick.  This is one of the unverified ideas that commend themselves,
+one knows not why.  We have had experiments to compare the relative
+quickness of perception proved by men and women.  The same experiments
+with children would give curious results, but they can hardly, perhaps,
+be made, because the children would be not only slow to perceive but slow
+to announce the perception; so the moment would go by, and the game be
+lost.  Not even amateur conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of a
+child's mind as does a little intricacy of grammar.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIELDS
+
+
+The pride of rustic life is the child's form of caste-feeling.  The
+country child is the aristocrat; he has _des relations suivies_ with
+game-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers.  He has a
+perfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or a suburb.  No
+essayist has so much feeling against terraces and villas.
+
+As for imitation country--the further suburb--it is worse than town; it
+is a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child's mind is
+hardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his affairs to
+think about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom of perpetual
+observation.  The child, compelled to walk, is the only unresting
+observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, and
+the tedious people.  He is bored as he will never be bored when a man.
+
+He is at his best where, under the welcome stress and pressure of
+abundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neither
+in mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of his
+little gains.  On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where maize
+and grapes are carried in the _botte_, so usually are children expected
+in the field that _bottes_ are made to the shape of a back and arms of
+five years old.  Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold no
+more than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans.  You may
+meet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score of
+times in the morning.  Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit sense
+of what is due to that labourer.  When the plums are gathered, for
+instance, she bakes in the general village oven certain round open tarts
+across which her arm can hardly reach.  No plum tarts elsewhere are
+anything but dull in comparison with these.  There is, besides, the first
+loaf from the new flour, brown from the maize and white from the wheat.
+Nor can a day of potato-gathering be more appropriately ended than with a
+little fire built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under the
+wood ashes.  Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even
+when the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a
+child's tooth.
+
+Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in a
+real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothing
+but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest of
+the hedges.  They have no little hand in the realities of cultivation,
+but wild growths give them blackberries.  Pale are the joys of nutting
+beside those of haymaking, but at least they are something.
+
+Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories
+for the future.  In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, taking
+flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating
+into the dark.  The daily progress of things in Spring is for children,
+who look close.  They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they
+breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct.  They have a sense of
+place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be
+recaptured.  Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees of
+the personality of a person; to the child the accidents of voice and look
+are charged with separate and unique character.  Such a sense of place as
+he got in a day within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that a
+sound or odour can bring it back in after days, with a shock--even such a
+sense of single personality does a little watchful girl get from the
+accents, the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence of
+a woman.  Not all places, nor all persons, are so quick with the
+expression of themselves; the child knows the difference.  As for places
+that are so loaded, and that breathe so, the child discerns them
+passionately.
+
+A travelled child multiplies these memories and has them in their
+variety.  His heart has room for many places that have the spirit of
+place.  The glacier may be forgotten, but some little tract of pasture
+that has taken wing to the head of a mountain valley, a field that has
+soared up a pass unnamed, will become a memory, in time, sixty years old.
+That is a fortunate child who has tasted country life in places far
+apart, who has helped, followed the wheat to the threshing-floor of a
+Swiss village, stumbled after a plough of Virgil's shape in remoter
+Tuscan hills, and gleaned after a vintage.  You cannot suggest pleasanter
+memories than those of the vintage, for the day when the wine will be
+old.
+
+
+
+
+THE BARREN SHORE
+
+
+It may be a disappointment to the children each year at play upon so many
+beaches--even if they are but dimly aware of their lack--to find their
+annual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing, indeed, to
+them, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once a year, but
+not annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons, not waxing and
+waning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons whereof no
+one knows which is the highest point and the secret and the ultimate
+purpose, not recreated, not new, and not yielding to the child anything
+raw and irregular to eat.
+
+Sand castles are well enough, and they are the very commonplace of the
+recollections of elders, of their rhetoric, and of what they think
+appropriate for their young ones.  Shingle and sand are good playthings,
+but absolute play is not necessarily the ideal of a child; he would
+rather have a frolic of work.  Of all the early autumn things to be done
+in holiday time, that game with the beach and the wave is the least good
+for holiday-time.
+
+Not that the shore is everywhere so barren.  The coast of the
+Londoners--all round the southern and eastern borders of England--is
+indeed the dullest of all sea-margins.  But away in the gentle bays of
+Jersey the summer grows a crop of seaweed which the long ocean wave
+leaves in noble curves upon the beach; for under sunny water the storms
+have gathered the crops.  The Channel Island people go gleaning after the
+sea, and store the seaweed for their fields.  Thus the beaches of Jersey
+bays are not altogether barren, and have a kind of dead and accessory
+harvest for the farmer.  After a night of storm these crops are stacked
+and carted and carried, the sea-wind catching away loose shreds from the
+summits of the loads.
+
+Further south, if the growth of the sea is not so put to use, the shore
+has yet its seasons.  You could hardly tell, if you did not know the
+month, whether a space of sea or a series of waves, at Aldborough, say,
+or at Dover, were summer or winter water; but in those fortunate regions
+which are southern, yet not too southern for winter, and have thus the
+strongest swing of change and the fullest pulse of the year, there are a
+winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate
+variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of
+September.  There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and
+unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head
+while your fingers are cold.  You bathe when the sun has set, and the
+vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can
+rest; and where you float, there float also by you opalescent jelly-fish,
+half transparent in the perfectly transparent water.  An hour in the warm
+sea is not enough.  Rock-bathing is done on lonely shores.  A city may be
+but a mile away, and the cultivated vineyards may be close above the
+seaside pine-trees, but the place is perfectly remote.  You pitch your
+tent on any little hollow of beach.  A charming Englishwoman who used to
+bathe with her children under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villa
+in the motionless white evenings of summer put white roses in her hair,
+and liked to sit out on a rock at sea where the first rays of the moon
+would touch her.
+
+You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day.  Nothing in the
+world is more uninteresting than eleven o'clock.  It is the hour of
+mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o'clock on a shingly
+beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing.  Twelve has a
+dignity always, and everywhere its name is great.  The noon of every day
+that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly.  One
+o'clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hour
+of the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening and
+lingering life.  To bathe at eleven in the sun, in the wind, to bathe
+from a machine, in a narrow sea that is certainly not clear and is only
+by courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience to a tyrannical tide and in
+water that is always much colder than yourself, to bathe in a hurry and
+in public--this is to know nothing rightly of one of the greatest of all
+the pleasures that humanity takes with nature.
+
+By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea than
+of mere straits.  These temperate islands would be better called the
+Ocean Islands.  When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, he
+composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter of
+some thought.  The final decision was to direct it, "A Victor Hugo,
+Ocean."  It reached him.  It even received a reply: "I am the Past, you
+are the Future; I am, etc."  If an English boy had had the same idea the
+name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it.  "A Victor Hugo, La
+Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but
+"the Channel" would have had no respect at all.  Indeed, this last is
+suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland--formless
+grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by a
+perpetual wind.
+
+As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea,
+machine-bathing at eleven o'clock will hardly furnish them with a magical
+early memory.  Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the
+rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails.  It was
+vulgarized for them and made violent.  A bathing woman, type of all
+ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the
+unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and
+returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and
+superfluous saltness of tears.  "Too much of water had they," poor
+infants.
+
+None the less is the barren shore the children's; and St. Augustine,
+Isaac Newton, and Wordsworth had not a vision of sea-beaches without a
+child there.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOY
+
+
+After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood of
+few explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phase
+which the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note as
+an impression.
+
+Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described but by
+negatives.  Above all, he is not demonstrative.  The days are long gone
+by when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and a pipe.  One or two
+of these things he has, and he takes them without the least swagger.  He
+avoids expression of any kind.  Any satisfaction he may feel with things
+as they are is rather to be surprised in his manner than perceived in his
+action.  Mr. Jaggers, when it befell him to be astonished, showed it by a
+stop of manner, for an indivisible moment--not by a pause in the thing he
+chanced to be about.  In like manner the boy cannot prevent his most
+innocent pleasures from arresting him.
+
+He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told to do
+anything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home.  His elders
+probably give him as few orders as possible.  He will almost ingeniously
+evade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted upon him, but if
+he does but succeed in only postponing his obedience, he has, visibly,
+done something for his own relief.  It is less convenient that he should
+hold mere questions, addressed to him in all good faith, as in some sort
+an attempt upon his liberty.
+
+Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage.  But it is
+against impersonal and indifferent questions also that the boy sets his
+face like a rock.  He has no ambition to give information on any point.
+Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and there are even those
+who bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for the pleasure of
+answering them with animation.  This, the boy perhaps thinks, is "fuss,"
+and, if he has any passions, he has a passionate dislike of fuss.
+
+When a younger child tears the boy's scrapbook (which is conjectured,
+though not known, to be the dearest thing he has) he betrays no emotion;
+that was to be expected.  But when the stolen pages are rescued and put
+by for him, he abstains from taking an interest in the retrieval; he will
+do nothing to restore them.  To do so would mar the integrity of his
+reserve.  If he would do much rather than answer questions, he would
+suffer something rather than ask them.
+
+He loves his father and a friend of his father's, and he pushes them, in
+order to show it without compromising his temperament.
+
+He is a partisan in silence.  It may be guessed that he is often occupied
+in comparing other people with his admired men.  Of this too he says
+little, except some brief word of allusion to what other men do _not_ do.
+
+When he speaks it is with a carefully shortened vocabulary.  As an author
+shuns monotony, so does the boy shun change.  He does not generally talk
+slang; his habitual words are the most usual of daily words made useful
+and appropriate by certain varieties of voice.  These express for him all
+that he will consent to communicate.  He reserves more by speaking dull
+words with zeal than by using zealous words that might betray him.  But
+his brevity is the chief thing; he has almost made an art of it.
+
+He is not "merry."  Merry boys have pretty manners, and it must be owned
+that this boy's manners are not pretty.  But if not merry, he is happy;
+there never was a more untroubled soul.  If he has an almost grotesque
+reticence, he has no secrets.  Nothing that he thinks is very much
+hidden.  Even if he did not push his father, it would be evident that the
+boy loves him; even if he never laid his hand (and this little thing he
+does rarely) on his friend's shoulder, it would be plain that he loves
+his friend.  His happiness appears in his moody and charming face, his
+ambition in his dumbness, and the hopes of his life to come in ungainly
+bearing.  How does so much heart, how does so much sweetness, all
+unexpressed, appear?  For it is not only those who know him well that
+know the child's heart; strangers are aware of it.  This, which he would
+not reveal, is the only thing that is quite unmistakable and quite
+conspicuous.
+
+What he thinks that he turns visibly to the world is a sense of humour,
+with a measure of criticism and of indifference.  What he thinks the
+world may divine in him is courage and an intelligence.  But carry
+himself how he will, he is manifestly a tender, gentle, and even
+spiritual creature, masculine and innocent--"a nice boy."  There is no
+other way of describing him than that of his own brief language.
+
+
+
+
+ILLNESS
+
+
+The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some little
+books, but none the less a fresh fact.  In spite of the sentimental,
+children in illness remain the full sources of perpetual surprises.  Their
+self-control in real suffering is a wonder.  A little turbulent girl,
+brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might be thought, to deal in any
+way with her own impulses--a child whose way was to cry out, laugh,
+complain, and triumph without bating anything of her own temperament, and
+without the hesitation of a moment, struck her face, on a run, against a
+wall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed with pain and covered with
+blood.  "Tell mother it's nothing!  Tell mother, quick, it's nothing!"
+cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.
+
+The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to lie
+for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken little
+body might recover itself.  Every movement was, in a measure, painful;
+and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded by
+twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that had
+carried her through all her years--impulse.  A condition of acute
+consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of life
+had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of a
+child's days and nights at eight years old.
+
+Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient,
+not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to
+be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never
+used before.  "You are exquisite to me, mother," she said, at receiving
+some common service.
+
+Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous child
+assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience.  Not that
+illness is to be trusted to work so.  There is another child who in his
+brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally.
+The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but an
+impossibility; but in any case it would be a failure.  You can bring the
+spoon to the child, but three nurses cannot make him drink.  This, then,
+is the occasion of the ultimate resistance.  He raises the standard of
+revolution, and casts every tradition and every precept to the wind on
+which it flies.  He has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursue
+him with a grotesque spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment,
+still more grotesque.  He is committed to the wild novelty of absolute
+refusal.  He not only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throws
+everything over.  Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilist
+laughs.
+
+Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy.  "Am I unwell
+to-day, mother?" asks a child with all his faith and confidence at the
+highest point.
+
+
+
+
+THE YOUNG CHILD
+
+
+The infant of literature "wails" and wails feebly, with the invariability
+of a thing unproved and taken for granted.  Nothing, nevertheless, could
+be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child of
+man catches his first breath.  It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and
+brief, rather deep than shrill in tone.  With all deference to old
+moralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts up
+his new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and with
+much the same tone as some of the duck kind there.  He does not weep for
+some months to come.  His outcry soon becomes the human cry that is
+better known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy.  And if the
+infant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too
+young to be gay.  A child's mirth, when at last it begins, is his first
+secret; you understand little of it.  The first smile (for the convulsive
+movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile)
+is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable.  It is
+accompanied by a single sound--a sound that would be a monosyllable if it
+were articulate--which is the utterance, though hardly the communication,
+of a private jollity.  That and that alone is the real beginning of human
+laughter.
+
+From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for the
+first time, and as it were flickeringly, the child's smile begins to grow
+definite and, gradually, more frequent.  By very slow degrees the secrecy
+passes away, and the dryness becomes more genial.  The child now smiles
+more openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing creature of so much
+prose and verse.  His laughter takes a long time to form.  The
+monosyllable grows louder, and then comes to be repeated with little
+catches of the breath.  The humour upon which he learns to laugh is that
+of something which approaches him quickly and then withdraws.  This is
+the first intelligible jest of jesting man.
+
+An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark the
+features of faces near him.  Whether because of the greater
+conspicuousness of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, he
+addresses his looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to the
+heads, not the faces, of his friends.  These are the ways of all infants,
+various in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the same
+things.  There are turns in a kitten's play--arched leapings and sidelong
+jumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances--which the sacred kittens
+of Egypt used in their time.  But not more alike are these repetitions
+than the impulses of all young children learning to laugh.
+
+In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much of
+his effect upon the world; not much of the effect of the world upon him.
+Yet he is compelled to endure the reflex results, at least, of all that
+pleases, distresses, or oppresses the world.  That he should be obliged
+to suffer the moods of men is a more important thing than that men should
+be amused by his moods.  If he is saddened, that is certainly much more
+than that his elders should be gladdened.  It is doubtless hardly
+possible that children should go altogether free of human affairs.  They
+might, in mere justice, be spared the burden they bear ignorantly and
+simply when it is laid upon them, of such events and ill fortunes as may
+trouble our peace; but they cannot easily be spared the hearing of a
+disturbed voice or the sight of an altered face.  Alas! they are made to
+feel money-matters, and even this is not the worst.  There are
+unconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries, of which they do not know
+the names, but which change the faces where they look for smiles.  To
+such alterations children are sensitive even when they seem least
+accessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels of
+elders.  Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droop
+when their defied tyrants are dejected.
+
+For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is a
+mere impulse and is easily disconcerted.  They are gay without knowing
+any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were,
+proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they are
+helpless and find no stay.  For this reason the merriest of all children
+are those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in a family nor in a
+public home by paid guardians, but in a place of charity, rightly named,
+where impartial, unalterable, and impersonal devotion has them in hand.
+They endure an immeasurable loss, and are orphans, but they gain in
+perpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature.  The separate
+nest is nature's, and the best; but it might be wished that the separate
+nest were less subject to moods.  The nurse has her private business, and
+when it does not prosper, and when the remote affairs of the governess go
+wrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration of the mishap.
+
+The uniformity of infancy passes away long before the age when children
+have this indefinite suffering inflicted upon them; and they have become
+infinitely various, and feel the consequences of the cares of their
+elders in unnumbered degrees.  The most charming children feel them the
+most sensibly, and not with resentment but with sympathy.  It is
+assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue of
+childhood.  What other thing are we to learn of them?  Not simplicity,
+for they are intricate enough.  Not gratitude; for their usual sincere
+thanklessness makes half the pleasure of doing them good.  Not obedience;
+for the child is born with the love of liberty.  And as for humility, the
+boast of a child is the frankest thing in the world.  A child's natural
+vanity is not merely the delight in his own possessions, but the triumph
+over others less fortunate.  If this emotion were not so young it would
+be exceedingly unamiable.  But the truth must be confessed that having
+very quickly learnt the value of comparison and relation, a child
+rejoices in the perception that what he has is better than what his
+brother has; this comparison is a means of judging his fortune, after
+all.  It is true that if his brother showed distress, he might make haste
+to offer an exchange.  But the impulse of joy is candidly egotistic.
+
+It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask pity for
+their sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive that
+they are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and who make
+no bargain for apologies--it is this that men and women are urged to
+learn of a child.  Graces more confessedly childlike they make shift to
+teach themselves.
+
+
+
+
+FAIR AND BROWN
+
+
+George Eliot, in one of her novels, has a good-natured mother, who
+confesses that when she administers justice she is obliged to spare the
+offenders who have fair hair, because they look so much more innocent
+than the rest.  And if this is the state of maternal feelings where all
+are more or less fair, what must be the miscarriage of justice in
+countries where a _blond_ angel makes his infrequent visit within the
+family circle?
+
+In England he is the rule, and supreme as a matter of course.  He is
+"English," and best, as is the early asparagus and the young potato,
+according to the happy conviction of the shops.  To say "child" in
+England is to say "fair-haired child," even as in Tuscany to say "young
+man" is to say "tenor."  "I have a little party to-night, eight or ten
+tenors, from neighbouring palazzi, to meet my English friends."
+
+But France is a greater enthusiast than our now country.  The fairness
+and the golden hair are here so much a matter of orthodoxy, that they are
+not always mentioned; they are frequently taken for granted.  Not so in
+France; the French go out of their way to make the exceptional fairness
+of their children the rule of their literature.  No French child dare
+show his face in a book--prose or poetry--without blue eyes and fair
+hair.  It is a thing about which the French child of real life can hardly
+escape a certain sensitiveness.  What, he may ask, is the use of being a
+dark-haired child of fact, when all the emotion, all the innocence, all
+the romance, are absorbed by the flaxen-haired child of fiction?  How
+deplorable that our mothers, the French infants may say, should have
+their unattained ideals in the nurseries of the imagination; how dismal
+that they should be perpetually disillusioned in the nurseries of fact!
+Is there then no sentiment for us? they may ask.  Will not convention,
+which has been forced to restore the advantage to truth on so many other
+points, be compelled to yield on this point also, and reconcile our aunts
+to the family colouring?
+
+All the schools of literature are in a tale.  The classic masters,
+needless to say, do not stoop to the colouring of boys and girls; but as
+soon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair ever
+in it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue, and no
+cheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses.  Victor Hugo, who
+discovered the child of modern poetry, never omits the touch of
+description; the word _blond_ is as inevitable as any epithet marshalled
+to attend its noun in a last-century poet's dictionary.  One would not
+have it away; one can hear the caress with which the master pronounces
+it, "making his mouth," as Swift did for his "little language."  Nor does
+the customary adjective fail in later literature.  It was dear to the
+Realist, and it is dear to the Symbolist.  The only difference is that in
+the French of the Symbolist it precedes the noun.
+
+And yet it is time that the sweetness of the dark child should have its
+day.  He is really no less childlike than the other.  There is a pretty
+antithesis between the strong effect of his colouring and the softness of
+his years and of his months.  The blond human being--man, woman or
+child--has the beauty of harmony; the hair plays off from the tones of
+the flesh, only a few degrees brighter or a few degrees darker.  Contrast
+of colour there is, in the blue of the eyes, and in the red of cheek and
+lip, but there is no contrast of tone.  The whole effect is that of much
+various colour and of equal tone.  In the dark face there is hardly any
+colour and an almost complete opposition of tone.  The complete
+opposition, of course, would be black and white; and a beautiful dark
+child comes near to this, but for the lovely modifications, the warmth of
+his white, and of his black alike, so that the one tone, as well as the
+other, is softened towards brown.  It is the beauty of contrast, with a
+suggestion of harmony--as it were a beginning of harmony--which is
+infinitely lovely.
+
+Nor is the dark child lacking in variety.  His radiant eyes range from a
+brown so bright that it looks golden in the light, to a brown so dark
+that it barely defines the pupil.  So is his hair various, answering the
+sun with unsuspected touches, not of gold but of bronze.  And his cheek
+is not invariably pale.  A dusky rose sometimes lurks there with such an
+effect of vitality as you will hardly get from the shallower pink of the
+flaxened haired.  And the suggestion is that of late summer, the colour
+of wheat almost ready for the harvest, and darker, redder flowers--poppies
+and others--than come in Spring.
+
+The dark eyes, besides, are generally brighter--they shelter a more
+liquid light than the blue or grey.  Southern eyes have generally most
+beautiful whites.  And as to the charm of the childish figure, there is
+usually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener that is at least
+as young and sweet as the round form of the blond child.  And yet the
+painters of Italy would have none of it.  They rejected the dusky
+brilliant pale little Italians all about them; they would have none but
+flaxen-haired children, and they would have nothing that was slim,
+nothing that was thin, nothing that was shadowy.  They rejoiced in much
+fair flesh, and in all possible freshness.  So it was in fair Flanders as
+well as in dark Italy.  But so it was not in Spain.  The Pyrenees seemed
+to interrupt the tradition.  And as Murillo saw the charm of dark heads,
+and the innocence of dark eyes, so did one English painter.  Reynolds
+painted young dark hair as tenderly as the youngest gold.
+
+
+
+
+REAL CHILDHOOD
+
+
+The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods
+and of their impressions.  Your hours when you were six were the enormous
+hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick
+forgetfulness.  Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at
+his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up,
+he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called
+minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then
+what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating
+hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right
+value, in the pauses of his anecdotes.  You, meanwhile, were infinitely
+tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.
+
+Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is
+inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit
+fully to confess it.
+
+You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such
+space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly that
+you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a
+dreadful fact of life.  You had better instinct than to complain of it to
+the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of
+the world in their hands--your seniors.  You remembered the duration of
+some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it
+until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.
+
+As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawing
+room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greater
+than Beethoven had any idea of.  You sat and listened, and tried to fix a
+passage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark, with the deliberate
+provident intention of helping yourself through the time during a future
+hearing; for you knew too well that you would have to bear it all again.
+You could not do the same with sermons, because, though even more
+fatiguing, they were more or less different each time.
+
+While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--and
+a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every house
+you lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence of
+mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it.  As to the length
+of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words do
+not measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleep
+in childhood.  Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from the
+duration of time--the names of streets, the names of tradesmen,
+especially the _fournisseurs_ of the household, who lived in them.
+
+You were bored by people.  It did not occur to you to be tired of those
+of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially.  Nor were
+you bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless they held
+you, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible voices
+and so look at their mannered faces that they released you an older child
+than they took you prisoner.  But--it is a reluctant confession--you were
+tired of your relations; you were weary of their bonnets.  Measured by
+adult time, those bonnets were, it is to be presumed, of no more than
+reasonable duration; they had no more than the average or common life.
+You have no reason, looking back, to believe that your great-aunts wore
+bonnets for great and indefinite spaces of time.  But, to your sense as a
+child, long and changing and developing days saw the same harassing
+artificial flowers hoisted up with the same black lace.  You would have
+had a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but you
+deliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet.  So with dresses,
+especially such as had any little misfit about them.  For you it had
+always existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing.  You seemed to
+have been aware of it for years.  By the way, there would be less cheap
+reproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knew
+how immensely old their old clothes are to them.
+
+The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary ugliness
+of things, and that--apart from the effects of _ennui_--they reject that
+ugliness actively.  You have stood and listened to your mother's
+compliments on her friend's hat, and have made your mental protest in
+very definite words.  You thought it hideous, and hideous things offended
+you then more than they have ever offended you since.  At nine years old
+you made people, alas! responsible for their faces, as you do still in a
+measure, though you think you do not.  You severely made them answer for
+their clothes, in a manner which you have seen good reason, in later
+life, to mitigate.  Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, you
+had no mercy.  To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they were
+friskiness of manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with rather
+bygone or frumpish fashions.  Too much childish dislike was wasted so.
+
+But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learnt
+later.  At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the contrast
+of a white kid glove and a bright red wrist.  Well, this is not the
+received arrangement, but red and white do go well together, and their
+distribution has to be taught with time.  Whose were the wrist and glove?
+Certainly some one's who must have been distressed at the _bouquet_ of
+colour that you admired.  This, however, was but a local admiration.  You
+did not admire the girl as a whole.  She whom you adored was always a
+married woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but always
+divinely elegant.  She alone was worthy to stand at the side of your
+mother.  You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for a
+chance of holding her bracelet when she played.  You composed prose in
+honour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown to
+yourself) a "catalogue."  She took singularly little notice of you.
+
+Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature.  The light of
+summer morning before sunrise was to you a spiritual splendour for which
+you wanted no name.  The Mediterranean under the first perceptible touch
+of the moon, the calm southern sea in the full blossom of summer, the
+early spring everywhere, in the showery streets, in the fields, or at
+sea, left old childish memories with you which you try to evoke now when
+you see them again.  But the cloudy dusk behind poplars on the plains of
+France, the flying landscape from the train, willows, and the last of the
+light, were more mournful to you then than you care to remember now.  So
+were the black crosses on the graves of the French village; so were
+cypresses, though greatly beloved.
+
+If you were happy enough to be an internationally educated child, you had
+much at heart the heart of every country you knew.  You disliked the
+English accent of your compatriots abroad with a scorn to which, needless
+to say, you are not tempted now.  You had shocks of delight from Swiss
+woods full of lilies of the valley, and from English fields full of
+cowslips.  You had disquieting dreams of landscape and sun, and of many
+of these you cannot now tell which were visions of travel and which
+visions of slumber.  Your strong sense of place made you love some places
+too keenly for peace.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN***
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