sound from the nursery during the next two hours we will come up and
do things to that Child the mere thought of which should appal it,
that is silencing the Child. It does not occur to him that two
minutes later that Child is yelling again at the top of its voice,
having forgotten all we ever said.

[The Child of Fiction.]

I know the sort of Child the weeper over Children's wrongs has in his
mind. It has deep, soulful, yearning eyes. It moves about the house
softly, shedding an atmosphere of patient resignation. It says:
"Yes, dear papa." "No, dear mamma." It has but one ambition--to be
good and useful. It has beautiful thoughts about the stars. You
don't know whether it is in the house or isn't: you find it with its
little face pressed close against the window-pane watching the golden
sunset. Nobody understands it. It blesses the old people and dies.
One of these days the young gentleman from Cambridge will, one hopes,
have a Baby of his own--a real Child: and serve him darn-well right.

At present he is labouring under a wrong conception of the article.
He says we over-educate it. We clog its wonderful brain with a mass
of uninteresting facts and foolish formulas that we call knowledge.
He does not know that all this time the Child is alive and kicking.
He is under the delusion that the Child is taking all this lying
down. We tell the Child it has got to be quiet, or else we will
wring its neck. The gentleman from Cambridge pictures the Child as
from that moment a silent spirit moving voiceless towards the grave.

We catch the Child in the morning, and clean it up, and put a little
satchel on its back, and pack it off to school; and the maiden lady