riendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and
returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and
superfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of water had they," poor
infants.

None the less is the barren shore the children's; and St. Augustine,
Isaac Newton, and Wordsworth had not a vision of sea-beaches without a
child there.

THE BOY

After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood of
few explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phase
which the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note as
an impression.

Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described but by
negatives. Above all, he is not demonstrative. The days are long gone
by when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and a pipe. One or two
of these things he has, and he takes them without the least swagger. He
avoids expression of any kind. Any satisfaction he may feel with things
as they are is rather to be surprised in his manner than perceived in his
action. Mr. Jaggers, when it befell him to be astonished, showed it by a
stop of manner, for an indivisible moment--not by a pause in the thing he
chanced to be about. In like manner the boy cannot prevent his most
innocent pleasures from arresting him.

He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told to do
anything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home. His elders
probably give him as few orders as possible. He will almost ingeniously
evade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted upon him, but if
he does but succeed in only postponing his obedience, he has, visibly,
done something for his own relief. It is less convenient that he should
hold mere questions, addressed to him in all good faith, as in some sort
an attempt upon his liberty.

Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage. But it is
against impersonal and indifferent questions also that the boy sets his
face like a rock. He has no ambition to give information on any point.
Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and there are even those
who bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for the pleasure of
answering them with animation. This, the boy perhaps thinks, is "fuss,"
and, if he has any passions, he has a passionate dislike of fuss.

When a younger child tears the boy's scrapbook (which is conjectured,
though not known, to be the dearest thing he h