much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith
and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some
invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of
spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of
mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are
even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow
to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together,
they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy
because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how
even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and
led by the nose with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper than
this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an interruption
in the business of life; and they must find some imaginative sanction,
and tell themselves some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to
render entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking. What
wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon
tea-cups!--from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world
of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game. When my
cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven
the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a
country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and
explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can
imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still
unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions
were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and travelled
on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew
furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and
grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether
secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we
seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I
ever had over a meal were in the case of calves'-feet jelly. It was
hardly possible not to believe--and you may be sure, so far from trying,
I did all I could to favour the illusion--that some part of it was
hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret
tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some miniature _Red Beard_
await his hour; there, might one find the treasures