triumph
in pedestrianism--the first successful independent stagger on his feet.
When I have sometimes claimed that memory carries me back so far, I have
been told that the impression is an afterthought, or an imagination, or
a remembrance of the achievement of some younger child. I know better.
It is an actual little fragment of my own experience, and nothing which
ever befell me in my whole lifetime is more precise or definite. I do
not know who held my petticoats bunched up behind to steady me for the
start, nor who held out a roughened finger to entice me. But I remember
the grip, and the feel of the finger when I reached it, as well as I
remember anything. And what makes the small experience so very definite
is, that after all this lapse of time I can still feel the sense of
peril and adventure, and the ringing self-applause which filled me when
the task was successfully accomplished. There was a fire in the grate on
my right hand side, and beneath my feet there was a rug which was made
up of hundreds of rough loops of parti-coloured cloth; and it was the
idea of getting over those loops which frightened me, and brought its
proper spice of adventure into the business. There is nothing before
this, and for two or three years, as I should guess, there is nothing
after it. That little firelit episode of infancy is isolated in the
midst of an impenetrable dark.

Where a child is not beaten, or bullied, or cautioned overmuch, it
is almost always very courageous to begin with. Where it survives
the innumerable mishaps incident to the career of what Tennyson calls
"dauntless infancy," it learns many lessons of caution. But the great
faculty of cowardice, which most grown men have developed in a
hundred forms, is no part of the child's original stock in trade. Even
cowardice, in its own degree, is a wholesome thing, because it is a part
and portion of that self-protective instinct which helps towards the
preservation of the individual of the race. But it would be a good
thing to place, if such a thing were possible, a complete embargo on
its importation into the infant kingdom. I suppose the true faculty for
being afraid belongs to very few people. There are many forms of genius,
and it is very likely, I believe, that the genius for a true cowardice
is as rare as the genius for writing great verse, or constructing a
great story, or guiding the ship of state through the crises of tempest
to a safe harbour. But every human fa