enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of
their own making is as good a communication as another, and as
intelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction among them
that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion
befalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings
forward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know how
irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to
belong to the common world.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a
child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much
confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple
adventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything
strange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trusts
genially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight of
sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing
himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets." This was
simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little
older. "Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said;
and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration,
answered, "because they are so big." There seemed to be no further
question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged
with meaning.

To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat
at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express
a meaning well realized--a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating
of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I
took them just to appetize my hunger." As she betrayed a familiar
knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked
whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on
their way from school. "I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed;
"but I generally speculate outside."

Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with
something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Dryden
does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But
sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders.
Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems,
allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satis