too often required of children that they should adjust themselves
to the world, practised and alert. But it would be more to the purpose
that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings with
them. Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of the
tardiest. But we are apt to command instant obedience, stripped of the
little pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without. It is
not a child of ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creature
who has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be startled.

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of senses
and of an unprepared consciousness--this capacity for receiving a great
shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or three
appreciable moments--if we would know anything of the moments of a baby

Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long for
children, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is too short
for them. When it is exceedingly short they cannot, without an unnatural
effort, have any perception of it. When children do not see the jokes of
the elderly, and disappoint expectation in other ways, only less
intimate, the reason is almost always there. The child cannot turn in
mid-career; he goes fast, but the impetus took place moments ago.

THE CHILD OF TUMULT

A poppy bud, packed into tight bundles by so hard and resolute a hand
that the petals of the flower never afterwards lose the creases, is a
type of the child. Nothing but the unfolding, which is as yet in the non-
existing future, can explain the manner of the close folding of
character. In both flower and child it looks much as though the process
had been the reverse of what it was--as though a finished and open thing
had been folded up into the bud--so plainly and certainly is the future
implied, and the intention of compressing and folding-close made
manifest.

With the other incidents of childish character, the crowd of impulses
called "naughtiness" is perfectly perceptible--it would seem heartless to
say how soon. The naughty child (who is often an angel of tenderness and
charm, affectionate beyond the capacity of his fellows, and a very
ascetic of penitence when the time comes) opens early his brief campaigns
and raises the standard of revolt as soon as he is capable of the
desperate joys of disobedience.

But even the naughty child is an individual, and must n