tion.
It instils the first distinct idea of the value of money; it gives the
first notion of the accumulation of precious things; and the little
proprietor or proprietrix comes to rattle the box with the narrow slit
as a sort of sly enjoyment. To break into a pose would be quite
profane and irreverent. Pose-boxes do not open, and so far read a
philosophic lesson to the proprietors. Always save, always add, always
hold as a sort of sacred deposit, the mysteriously precious
pose-boxes. Occasionally, again, a child gets a present of a
sovereign, or an old-fashioned guinea, which it would be dreadful
sacrilege to change. Every one will remember how Sophy and Livy
Primrose 'never went without money themselves, as my wife always let
them have a guinea each to keep in their pockets, but with strict
injunctions never to change it.' There are hundreds of thousands of
Sophies and Livies possessed of the same sacred store, or having given
it to their parents 'to keep,' over whose minds the remembrance of the
secret hoard every now and then sends flashing across the mind
of the child a sense of importance, or richness, or a general
self-complacency which varies with the individuality. Boys and girls
in the next stages of their growth care little and think little about
money, except as a means of obtaining some trifling passing
indulgence. The childish reverence for the pose has passed. The
unopenable box has been long since opened, and the unchangeable guinea
long since changed. We allude here, of course, to the children of the
well-to-do. With the children of the poor, the case is different.
They never lose the faculty of monetary sensation. Money is too
valuable to them, because as soon as the mere childish period is past,
and sometimes before it, money to the young poor is always
translatable into good food and new clothes. There is nothing more
sadly frequent in the squalid lanes and alleys of London, than to see
a little creature, boy or girl, toddle with a chance-penny, not into
the toy-shop or the sweet-shop, but into the cook-shop, and there
spend the treasure in food, taking care, with melancholy precocity, to
have the full weight, and only a due proportion of gristle or fat.
Further on in life, when a poor boy earns a chance-sixpence or a
shilling, there is so much added to the store laying up for the new
jacket, the new cap, or the new boots; or, not unfrequently, there is
so much gained for the family exigencies of Satu