re difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of
their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this
juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings in the
meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle
jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of
life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for
those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon
as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be
wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world;
but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself
up among my playthings until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in
the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he
remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and
decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood
was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not
unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably
anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into effect. There was a
worm i' the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass
away, and then youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to
be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing
circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an
adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives,
into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve
well of yourself and your neighbour.

You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over
the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score
on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and
expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was
outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things,
which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see
that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of
stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have
a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put
by babes and sucklings. Their most anti-social acts indicate the defects
of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you
must expect him to scream, and you n