le than an army with banners, the
ceaseless pelting feet of children--of Whittingtons turning and turning
again.' Well, I still hear that footfall: but it has become less terrible
to me, though not one whit less insistent: and it began to grow less
terrible from the hour I picked up and read a certain little book, _The
Invisible Playmate_, to the author of which (Mr. William Canton) I desire
here to tender my thanks. In a little chapter of that little book Mr.
Canton tells of an imaginary poem written by an imaginary Arm.
(Arminius?), Altegans, an elderly German cobbler of 'the village of
Wieheisstes, in the pleasant crag-and-fir region of Schlaraffenland.' Its
name is the 'Erster Schulgang,' and I will own, and gratefully, that few
real poems by real 'classics' have so sung themselves into my ears, or so
shamed the dulness out of drudgery, as have the passages which I here set
down for the mere pleasure of transcribing them:--

"The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it
is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in
fact. All over the world--and all under it, too, when their time
comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings
round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning
somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light
the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot--shining companies and
groups, couples, and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to
have a soft heavenly light about them!

"He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely
moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread the expanse of
green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or the mountain
ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen stones set up by
the Druids in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the
woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along
the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; trespassing on the
railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in
ferry-boats: he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in
small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only
as a strange tradition.

"The morning-side of the planet is alive with them; one hears their
pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep