oans, which he
accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the
inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a wise young gentleman, he
would waste no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little
for rational enjoyment, and are even the enemies of rational enjoyment
for others, he had accepted without understanding and without complaint,
as the rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.

We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until
the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the
while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly
what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find
anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When
his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of
a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of
breath. When he comes to ride with the king's pardon, he must bestride a
chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and on which he will so
furiously demean himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody
with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance involves an
accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the chest of
drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination is
satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same
category and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child's faith;
he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or
valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the
accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can
skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the
enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener
soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make abstraction
of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes into his
pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is,
that although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in a
hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as
lie in the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the line
of the highroad, or so might a landscape painter and a bagman visit the
same country, and yet move in different worlds.

People, struck with t