ke some blow for
liberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual child, or the
stroke of the conqueror; but something, something is done for freedom
under the early stars.

This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict with
the weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy of men
should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at some
time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of the
poor.

Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved by
children. Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to beguile the
time. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another to
play. "Oh come," she said, "and play with me at new maid."

The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable hour.
It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits. The habit of
prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity of
some customs in mankind. But if the enquirers who appeal to that
beginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek no
further. See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in their
thralldom. Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction of
their high antiquity weakens your hand.

Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense of
mystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby. The French sleep-
song is the most romantic. There is in it such a sound of history as
must inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of the
incalculable; and the songs themselves are old. _Le Bon Roi
Dagobert_ has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh.
The nurse knows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she
herself slept to when a child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in
_Le Pont a' 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 fil