initial commit of ebook 2012HEADmain

2 files changed, 2031 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/chldn10.txt b/old/chldn10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e869676
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/chldn10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2031 @@
+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Children, by Alice Meynell*
+#8 in our series by Alice Meynell
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The Children
+
+by Alice Meynell
+
+December, 1999  [Etext #2012]
+
+
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Childre,n by Alice Meynell**
+******This file should be named chldn10.txt or chldn10.zip*******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, chldn11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, chldn10a.txt
+
+
+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1911 John Lane edition.
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do usually do NOT! keep
+these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text
+files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly
+from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an
+assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few
+more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we
+don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email.
+
+******
+
+To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser
+to view http://promo.net/pg.  This site lists Etexts by
+author and by title, and includes information about how
+to get involved with Project Gutenberg.  You could also
+download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here.  This
+is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,
+for a more complete list of our various sites.
+
+To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any
+Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror
+sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed
+at http://promo.net/pg).
+
+Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
+
+Example FTP session:
+
+ftp sunsite.unc.edu
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+***
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1911 John Lane edition.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 Etext of The Children, by Alice Meynell
+
diff --git a/old/chldn10.zip b/old/chldn10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9df1fc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/chldn10.zip