things fitted to make
the reader laugh, and sometimes fitted to bring myself into perplexity.
One instance from a thousand may illustrate the combination of both
effects. At four years old, I had repeatedly seen the housemaid raising
her long broom and pursuing (generally destroying) a vagrant spider. The
holiness of all life, in my eyes, forced me to devise plots for saving the
poor doomed wretch; and thinking intercession likely to prove useless, my
policy was--to draw off the housemaid on pretence of showing her a
picture, until the spider, already _en route_, should have had time to
escape. Very soon, however, the shrewd housemaid, marking the coincidence
of these picture exhibitions with the agonies of fugitive spiders,
detected my stratagem; so that, if the reader will pardon an expression
borrowed from the street, henceforwards the picture was "no go." However,
as she approved of my motive, she told me of the many murders that the
spider had committed, and next (which was worse) of the many that he
certainly _would_ commit if reprieved. This staggered me. I could have
gladly forgiven the past; but it _did_ seem a false mercy to spare one
spider in order to scatter death amongst fifty flies. I thought timidly
for a moment, of suggesting that people sometimes repented, and that _he_
might repent; but I checked myself, on considering that I had never read
any account, and that she might laugh at the idea, of a penitent spider.
To desist was a necessity in these circumstances. But the difficulty which
the housemaid had suggested, did not depart; it troubled my musing mind to
perceive, that the welfare of one creature might stand upon the ruin of
another: and the case of the spider remained thenceforwards even more
perplexing to my understanding than it was painful to my heart.

The reader is likely to differ from me upon the question, moved by
recurring to such experiences of childhood, whether much value attaches to
the perceptions and intellectual glimpses of a child. Children, like men,
range through a gamut that is infinite, of temperaments and characters,
ascending from the very dust below our feet to highest heaven. I have seen
children that were sensual, brutal, devilish. But, thanks be to the _vis
medicatrix_ of human nature, and to the goodness of God, these are as rare
exhibitions as all other monsters. People thought, when seeing such odious
travesties and burlesques upon lovely human infancy, that perhaps t