d to go through the decent
streets, and creeping out of sight by back-ways. We have all seen
_that_. We have all sympathized heartily with the reduced widow who
has it not in her power to dress her boy better; and we have all felt
lively indignation at the parents who had the power to attire their
children becomingly, but whose heartless parsimony made the little
things go about under a constant sense of painful degradation.

An extremely wicked way of punishing children is by shutting them up in
a dark place. Darkness is naturally fearful to human beings, and the
stupid ghost-stories of many nurses make it especially fearful to a
child. It is a stupid and wicked thing to send a child on an errand in a
dark night. I do not remember passing through a greater trial in my
youth than once walking three miles alone (it was not going on an
errand) in the dark, along a road thickly shaded with trees. I was a
little fellow; but I got over the distance in half an hour. Part of the
way was along the wall of a church-yard, one of those ghastly, weedy,
neglected, accursed-looking spots where stupidity has done what it can
to add circumstances of disgust and horror to the Christian's long
sleep. Nobody ever supposed that this walk was a trial to a boy of
twelve years old: so little are the thoughts of children understood. And
children are reticent: I am telling now about that dismal walk for the
very first time. And in the illnesses of childhood, children sometimes
get very close and real views of death. I remember, when I was nine
years old, how every evening, when I lay down to sleep, I used for about
a year to picture myself lying dead, till I felt as though the coffin
were closing round me. I used to read at that period, with a curious
feeling of fascination, Blair's poem, "The Grave." But I never dreamed
of telling anybody about these thoughts. I believe that thoughtful
children keep most of their thoughts to themselves, and in respect of
the things of which they think most are as profoundly alone as the
Ancient Mariner in the Pacific. I have heard of a parent, an important
member of a very strait sect of the Pharisees, whose child, when dying,
begged to be buried not in a certain foul old hideous church-yard, but
in a certain cheerful cemetery. This request the poor little creature
made with all the energy of terror and despair. But the strait Pharisee
refused the dying request, and pointed out with polemical bitterness to
the