oes not mind castigation any more than
he does tearing his trousers in the briers. If I had treated him with
kindness, and conciliated him with grapes, showing him the enormity of
his offense, I suppose he would have come the next night, and taken the
remainder of the grapes. The truth is, that the public morality is lax
on the subject of fruit. If anybody puts arsenic or gunpowder into his
watermelons, he is universally denounced as a stingy old murderer by the
community. A great many people regard growing fruit as lawful prey, who
would not think of breaking into your cellar to take it. I found a man
once in my raspberry-bushes, early in the season, when we were waiting
for a dishful to ripen. Upon inquiring what he was about, he said he was
only eating some; and the operation seemed to be so natural and simple,
that I disliked to disturb him. And I am not very sure that one has a
right to the whole of an abundant crop of fruit until he has gathered
it. At least, in a city garden, one might as well conform his theory to
the practice of the community.

As for children (and it sometimes looks as if the chief products of
my garden were small boys and hens), it is admitted that they are
barbarians. There is no exception among them to this condition of
barbarism. This is not to say that they are not attractive; for they
have the virtues as well as the vices of a primitive people. It is held
by some naturalists that the child is only a zoophyte, with a stomach,
and feelers radiating from it in search of something to fill it. It is
true that a child is always hungry all over: but he is also curious
all over; and his curiosity is excited about as early as his hunger. He
immediately begins to put out his moral feelers into the unknown and the
infinite to discover what sort of an existence this is into which he has
come. His imagination is quite as hungry as his stomach. And again and
again it is stronger than his other appetites. You can easily engage
his imagination in a story which will make him forget his dinner. He
is credulous and superstitious, and open to all wonder. In this, he is
exactly like the savage races. Both gorge themselves on the marvelous;
and all the unknown is marvelous to them. I know the general impression
is that children must be governed through their stomachs. I think they
can be controlled quite as well through their curiosity; that being the
more craving and imperious of the two. I have seen children