ory mingled with uncertain dreams. Never forgotten, and yet never
certainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening. When
many and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there never
was any kind of doubt, has been long forgotten, that evening--as to which
all is doubt--is impossible to forget. In a few years it has become so
remote that the history of Greece derives antiquity from it. In later
years it is still doubtful, still a legend.

The child never asked how much was fact. It was always so immeasurably
long ago that the sweet party happened--if indeed it happened. It had so
long taken its place in that past wherein lurks all the antiquity of the
world. No one would know, no one could tell him, precisely what
occurred. And who can know whether--if it be indeed a dream--he has
dreamt it often, or has dreamt once that he had dreamt it often? That
dubious night is entangled in repeated visions during the lonely life a
child lives in sleep; it is intricate with illusions. It becomes the
most mysterious and the least worldly of all memories, a spiritual past.
The word pleasure is too trivial for such a remembrance. A midwinter
long gone by contained the suggestion of such dreams; and the midwinter
of this year must doubtless be preparing for the heart of many an ardent
young child a like legend and a like antiquity. For the old it is a mere
present.

THAT PRETTY PERSON

During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one
significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an
interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This
is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of
process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of
progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than
resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their
transitoriness.

What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world,
for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for
the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold, perhaps,
that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should
acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.

But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a
patient