the ruined abbey we seemed to get on
so much faster," you would say, or--"after the steamer had passed the
Spearhead Point, we began to feel dull and tired, and there was no more
sunshine."

I think it is so in life. Suddenly, often quite unknowingly, we turn a
corner sometimes of our history, sometimes of our characters, and
looking back, long afterwards, we make a date of that point. It was so
just now with my little Carrots. This trouble of his about the
half-sovereign changed him. I do not mean to say that it saddened him
and made him less happy than he had been--at his age, thank God, few, if
any children have it in them to be so deeply affected--but it _changed_
him. It was his first peep out into life, and it gave him his first real
_thoughts_ about things. It made him see how a little wrong-doing may
cause great sorrow; it gave him his first vague, misty glimpse of that,
to my thinking, saddest of all sad things--the way in which it is
possible for our very nearest and dearest to mistake and misunderstand
us.

He had been in some ways a good deal of a baby for his age, there is no
doubt. He had a queer, baby-like way of not seeming to take in quickly
what was said to him, and staring up in your face with his great
oxen-like eyes, that did a little excuse Maurice's way of laughing at
him and telling him he was "half-witted." But no one that really looked
at those honest, sensible, tender eyes could for an instant have thought
there was any "want" in their owner. It was all _there_--the root of all
goodness, cleverness, and manliness--just as in the acorn there is the
oak; but of course it had a great deal of _growing_ before it, and, more
than mere growing, it would need all the care and watchful tenderness
and wise directing that could be given it, just as the acorn needs all
the rain and sunshine and good nourishing soil it can get, to become a
fine oak, straight and strong and beautiful. For what do I mean by "it,"
children? I mean the "own self" of Carrots, the wonderful "something" in
the little childish frame which the wisest of all the wise men of
either long ago or now-a-days have never yet been able to describe--the
"soul," children, which is in you all, which may grow into so beautiful,
so lovely and perfect a thing; which may, alas! be twisted and stunted
and starved out of all likeness to the "image" in which it was created.

Do you understand a little why it seems sometimes such a very, very
solem