The Children | Page 5

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