ft us stragglers. We fell out of all ranks. Among
the sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best was
an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure. In good time we found the moon
in the sky, in good time the eclipse set in and made reasonable progress;
we kept up with everything.

It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselves
to the world, practised and alert. But it would be more to the purpose
that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings with
them. Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of the
tardiest. But we are apt to command instant obedience, stripped of the
little pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without. It is
not a child of ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creature
who has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be startled.

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of senses
and of an unprepared consciousness--this capacity for receiving a great
shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or three
appreciable moments--if we would know anything of the moments of a baby

Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long for
children, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is too short
for them. When it is exceedingly short they cannot, without an unnatural
effort, have any perception of it. When children do not see the jokes of
the elderly, and disappoint expectation in other ways, only less
intimate, the reason is almost always there. The child cannot turn in
mid-career; he goes fast, but the impetus took place moments ago.

THAT PRETTY PERSON

During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one
significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an
interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This
is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of
process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of
progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than
resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their
transitoriness.

What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world,
for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for
the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not