and teething convulsions only wait
their opportunity to mark him for their prey, and so he howls:

"Ah! (_A pant._)
Ah-ha! AH! (_A pause to gather forces._)
Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha!
Ah! AH! E'EE!"
(_Fortissimo, crescendo_, and _ad libitum_.)

The nurse will be likely to say it is a pin, but it is not. It is
because the baby guesses what it has got to go through before it grows
up. If ever it grows up at all. There is a period between childhood and
maturity of which one doesn't want to write. No man likes to remember
that he was once a long-legged, red-wristed hobbledehoy, who drowned his
freckles in blushes when girls, who did not happen to be his sisters,
looked at him, and shaved surreptitiously with his mother's scissors. No
woman cares about looking back to the days when she had thick ankles,
which her skirts were not long enough to cover; when she wore her hair
in a pigtail, because she was too old to wear it loose upon her
shoulders, and too young to turn it up; when the front hooks and eyes of
her frock were always bursting off, and her sister's sweethearts used to
call her "little girl." A humiliating experience altogether, the period
of adolescence. But more humiliating still it is to be a mature,
grown-up person, and know how far off you are from being the wonderful
creature you intended to be, when you began the world. You did not
contemplate being exactly beautiful--it is not for everyone to achieve
that--but you meant to be commanding. You were going to do everything
well: to succeed gloriously--to be distinguished and brilliant--knock
lumps off this poor old globe, in fact. And now--well--you haven't! The
clay you're made of is the ordinary kind: not the blue earth diamonds
grow in. You might make up for your absolute lack of individuality by a
brilliant suicide. But you don't. You're too commonplace. You're
contented to go on being nobody. This may be a calm state, but it is
certainly not a happy one.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: But there are exceptions.]

And yet there is a childhood which is, maybe, the happiest period of our
existence. Not the time of the shining morning face--of the curled
top-knot--for to the excoriating action of the soaped towel was due that
facial polish, and the twisting of the damped hair around the
long-tailed ivory brush was attended with the shedding of bitter tears
of rage and pain. But the second edition of the Book of Infancy, bound