After an interval she pointed to the hedge. "Look at the leaves," she
said. "I could go and count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would
that be a hundred years?"

And no further could we get, since I could not make out just what the
question meant. At first it looked as if she thought of the leaves as
an illustration--or a symbol; and then that she had failed to grasp the
idea of time, or that it had slipped from her, and she had fallen back,
as it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a hundred objects, which
you could see and feel. There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle-
dom into which we had both got, so that it came as a relief to both of
us when she heard her mother calling--calling her back into a world she
could understand.

I believe that when we penetrate to the real mind of girl children we
find a strong likeness in them even when they appear to differ as
widely from one another as adults do. The difference in the little ones
is less in disposition and character than in unlikeness due to
unconscious imitation. They take their mental colour from their
surroundings. The red men of America are the gravest people on the
globe, and their children are like them when with them; but this
unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a mask which drops or fades
off when they assemble together out of sight and hearing of their
elders. In like manner our little ones have masks to fit the character
of the homes they are bred in.

Here I recall a little girl I once met when I was walking somewhere on
the borders of Dorset and Hampshire. It was at the close of an autumn
day, and I was on a broad road in a level stretch of country with the
low buildings of a farmhouse a quarter of a mile ahead of me, and no