ana" in its 150th thousand) than he was in his childhood, but that is
because his childhood was devoid of Idealism. On the other hand, if I
may be pardoned for mentioning myself in the same paragraph with the
greatest novelist of all time, my own childhood was happy because I
lived purely in a world of the imagination. There never was a bolder or
more truly noble pirate than I was during the hour of the Sunday sermon,
when I whiled away the good clergyman's discourse by sweeping the seas
in my piratical schooner, and harrowing the Spanish Main. My tin
soldiers were flesh and blood heroes, my kites flew nearly to the outer
limits of the solar system, and I never quite lost the belief that I
could dig a tunnel to China with the kitchen fire-shovel, had the cook
only had sufficient scientific zeal to be willing to lend it to me for a
few hours. I was very happy then, but I am equally happy now. I have
never got over the Idealism of my childhood, and I make my own political
and social world to-day quite as irrationally and delightfully as I did
eighty--well, when I was a child. I do find, I admit, that one cannot be
an Idealist in financial matters, which is, after all, the main source
of unhappiness in mature life, but if you ask me whether I was happier
in childhood than I am now, I should not know how to answer. All of
which goes to show that I might have done better if I had stuck to the
safe and judicious in my attempted answer, instead of yielding to the
temptation to be philosophical.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Miss Florence Marryat thinks it the most miserable.]

If I am to choose one, or the other, extreme, I should say decidedly the
most miserable, and made so by the folly, ignorance, or neglect of
parents. Not one-hundredth part of the men and women who marry are fit
to become fathers and mothers. Who does not pity the wretched little
mortal whom one meets, dressed up in some fantastic or grotesque
costume, to gratify the vanity of those who own it, forbidden to run or
play, for fear of spoiling the velvet tunic, or silken sash--unable to
be comfortable even, on account of buttoned boots and kid gloves? A
child is simply a young animal. Give it warmth and food and liberty, and
it will be happy and hungry and healthy! To dress it up in the fashion,
and let it be dragged at the heels of an indifferent nursemaid along a
pavement, is tantamount to confining a puppy by a heavy chain to a
k