ll-ordered according
to our best wishes for it, it would be _naturally_ true. It
expresses the natural love of Age, brooding on the natural eager
joy of children. But that natural eager joy is just what our
schools, in the matter of reading, conscientiously kill.

In this matter of reading-of children's reading--we stand, just
now, or halt just now, between two ways. The parent, I believe,
has decisively won back to the right one which good mothers never
quite forsook. There was an interval, lasting from the early
years of the last century until midway in Queen Victoria's reign
and a little beyond, when children were mainly brought up on the
assumption of natural vice. They might adore father and mother,
and yearn to be better friends with papa: but there was the old
Adam, a quickening evil spirit; there were his imps always in the
way, confound them! I myself lived, with excellent grandparents,
for several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an
all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both that I have
never since had the smallest use for either. Some of you may have
read, as a curious book, the agreeable history called "The
Fairchild Family," in which Mr Fairchild leads his naughty
children afield to a gallows by a cross-road and seating them
under the swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily
they may come to this if they go on as they have been going. The
authors of such monitory or cautionary tales understood but one
form of development, the development of Original Sin. You stole a
pin and proceeded, by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw
a stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper and
ended on the gallows. You were always Eric and it was always
Little by Little with you.... Stay! memory preserves one gem from
a Sunday school dialogue, one sharp-cut intaglio of childhood
springing fully armed from the head of Satan:

Q. Where hast thou been this Sabbath morning?
A. I have been coursing of the squirrel.
Q. Art not afraid so to desecrate the Lord's Day with idle
sport?
A. By no means: for I should tell you that I am an Atheist.

I forget what happened to that boy: but doubtless it was, as it
should have been, something drastic.

The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong upon
these authors that when they try to break away from it, to appeal
to something better than fear in the child, and essay to amuse,
they become merely silly. For an example