ry clear-headed sense of the value of words. So that
a little girl of that age, told that she may buy some fruit, and wishing
to know her limits in spending, asks, "What mustn't it be more than?" For
a child, who has not the word "maximum" at hand, nothing could be more
precise and concise. Still later, there is a sweet brevity that looks
almost like conscious expression, as when a boy writes from his first
boarding school: "Whenever I can't stop laughing I have only to think of
home."

Infinitely different as children are, they differ in nothing more than in
the degree of generosity. The most sensitive of children is a little gay
girl whose feelings are hurt with the greatest facility, and who seems,
indeed, to have the susceptibilty of other ages as well as of her own--for
instance, she cannot endure without a flush of pain to hear herself
called fat. But she always brings her little wound to him who has
wounded her. The first confidant she seeks is the offender. If you have
laughed at her she will not hide her tears elsewhere than on your
shoulder. She confesses by her exquisite action at one her poor vanity
and her humility.

The worst of children in the country is their inveterate impulse to use
death as their toy. Immediately on their discovery of some pretty
insect, one tender child calls to the other "Dead it."

Children do not look at the sky unless it is suggested to them to do so.
When the sun dips to the narrow horizon of their stature, and comes to
the level of their eyes, even then they are not greatly interested.
Enormous clouds, erect, with the sun behind, do not gain their eyes. What
is of annual interest is the dark. Having fallen asleep all the summer
by daylight, and having awakened after sunrise, children find a stimulus
of fun and fear in the autumn darkness outside the windows. There is a
frolic with the unknown blackness, with the reflections, and with the
country night.

EXPRESSION

Strange to say, the eyes of children, whose minds are so small, express
intelligence better than do the greater number of adult eyes. David
Garrick's were evidently unpreoccupied, like theirs. The look of
intelligence is outward--frankly directed upon external things; it is
observant, and therefore mobile without inner restlessness. For restless
eyes are the least observant of all--they move by a kind of distraction.
The looks of observant eyes, moving with the living things they keep in