to the old convention: "I didn't know what I was doing," he
avers, using a great deal of gesticulation to express the temporary
distraction of his mind. "Darling, after nurse slapped me as hard as she
could, I didn't know what I was doing, so I suppose I pushed her with my
foot." His mother knows as well as does Tolstoi that men and children
know what they are doing, and are the more intently aware as the stress
of feeling makes the moments more tense; and she will not admit a plea
which her child might have learned from the undramatic authors he has
never read.

Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from taking
fright at the name of a bribe, the mother of the Child of Tumult has only
to wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to give the
shock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy, and change his
passion at its height.

THE UNREADY

It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick. They are, on
the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, until advancing
age teaches them agility. This is not lack of sensitiveness, but mere
length of process. For instance, a child nearly newly born is cruelly
startled by a sudden crash in the room--a child who has never learnt to
fear, and is merely overcome by the shock of sound; nevertheless, that
shock of sound does not reach the conscious hearing or the nerves but
after some moments, nor before some moments more is the sense of the
shock expressed. The sound travels to the remoteness and seclusion of
the child's consciousness, as the roar of a gun travels to listeners half
a mile away.

So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eager
with us of later age that no point of time is lost in its touches--direct
as the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered by
trivialities; even so immediate is the communication of pain. But you
could count five between the prick of a surgeon's instrument upon a
baby's arm and the little whimper that answers it. The child is then too
young, also, to refer the feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it.
Even when pain has groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to bring
local tidings thither. The baby does not turn his eyes in any degree
towards his arm or towards the side that is so vexed with vaccination. He
looks in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random.

See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension