erse that she herself
slept to when a child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in "Le Pont
d'Avignon," is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the _tete a tete_
of child and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night.
"Malbrook" would be comparatively modern, were not all things that are
sung to a drowsing child as distant as the day of Abraham.

If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some of
them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate races
that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the white
child. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropical
night. His closing eyes are filled with alien images.

THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME

He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious of
something more than a change in his sense of the present and in his
apprehension of the future. He must be aware of no less a thing than the
destruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did,
and the mere relation of time is as it was. But that which has fallen
together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is
the past itself--time--the fact of antiquity.

He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are no
more extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit of
measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of
paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He had
thought them to be wide.

For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states,
the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure which
he holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten years
had given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It was
then that he conceived Antiquity. But now! Is it to a decade of ten
such little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--that
men give the dignity of a century? They call it an age; but what if life
shows now so small that the word age has lost its gravity?

In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a most
noble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years. He attributes an
overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, and
he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more than
mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of the
p