its woe, to warn its happy, heedless victims? Why cannot Olympians ever
think it worth while to give some hint of the thunderbolts they are
silently forging? And why, oh, why did it never enter any of our thick
heads that the day would come when even Charlotte would be considered
too matronly for toys? One's so-called education is hammered into one
with rulers and with canes. Each fresh grammar or musical instrument,
each new historical period or quaint arithmetical rule, is impressed
on one by some painful physical prelude. Why does Time, the biggest
Schoolmaster, alone neglect premonitory raps, at each stage of his
curriculum, on our knuckles or our heads?

Uncle Thomas was at the bottom of it. This was not the first mine he had
exploded under our bows. In his favourite pursuit of fads he had passed
in turn from Psychical Research to the White Rose and thence to a
Children's Hospital, and we were being daily inundated with leaflets
headed by a woodcut depicting Little Annie (of Poplar) sitting up in
her little white cot, surrounded by the toys of the nice, kind,
rich children. The idea caught on with the Olympians, always open to
sentiment of a treacly, woodcut order; and accordingly Charlotte, on
entering one day dishevelled and panting, having been pursued by yelling
Redskins up to the very threshold of our peaceful home, was curtly
informed that her French lessons would begin on Monday, that she was
henceforth to cease all pretence of being a trapper or a Redskin on
utterly inadequate grounds, and moreover that the whole of her toys were
at that moment being finally packed up in a box, for despatch to London,
to gladden the lives and bring light into the eyes of London waifs and
Poplar Annies.

Naturally enough, perhaps, we others received no official intimation of
this grave cession of territory. We were not supposed to be interested.
Harold had long ago been promoted to a knife--a recognized, birthday
knife. As for me, it was known that I was already given over, heart and
soul, to lawless abandoned catapults--catapults which were confiscated
weekly for reasons of international complications, but with which Edward
kept me steadily supplied, his school having a fine old tradition for
excellence in their manufacture. Therefore no one was supposed to be
really affected but Charlotte, and even she had already reached Miss
Yonge, and should therefore have been more interested in prolific
curates and harrowing deathb