w, or call
forth the energies needed to bear it. The child lives in the present,
and this present is but the reflection of the world around, its
impressions uncontrolled by experience, ungoverned by reason.

The broken-heartedness of a child on leaving home is not the expression
only of intense affection for its friends or relations, it is the shock
of separation from the familiar objects which have surrounded it; and I
have not infrequently seen children inconsolable when removed from homes
that were most wretched, or from relations who were most unkind. Every
now and then, indeed, I have been compelled to send children home from
the hospital because no love nor care could reconcile them to the change
from home; and they have refused to eat, and spent their nights in
weeping. The feeling is an unreasoning one, like the home-sickness of
the mountaineer.

But, moreover, sudden shocks may sometimes overthrow the whole moral
equilibrium, and disarrange the balance of the nervous system so
seriously as to cause the death of a child previously free from any
important ailment. Thus, I remember a little boy five years of age who
died sixteen days after his father's funeral. The strange sad scene
overcame him, though there had been no special tie between him and his
father. He shivered violently, became very sick, complained by signs of
pain in the head, for he had lost his speech, which he regained by slow
degrees in the course of four or five days. Improvement in other
respects did not take place, he lay in a drowsy state save when he
called for his mother, and at length the drowsiness deepened into
stupor, and so he died. I suppose his mother was right; she said his
heart was broken.

It behoves us to bear in mind that the heart may break, or the reason
fail, under causes that seem to us quite insufficient; that the griefs
of childhood may be, in proportion to the child's powers of bearing
them, as overwhelming as those which break the strong man down. Every
now and then we are shocked by the tale that some young child has
committed suicide, and for reasons which to our judgment seem most
trivial--from fear of punishment, or even from mere dread of reproof.
These facts deserve special attention, they show how much more the
susceptibility and sensitiveness of children need to be taken into
consideration than is commonly done.

This keenness of the emotions in children displays itself in other ways,
and has constantly to