The Children

								

because I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into his
nose."
The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no, nothing
feminine--in this adult world.  "I've got a lotter than you," is the word
of a very young egotist.  An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern't
I, mother?"  He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "the
backy-garden."  A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder at
luncheon--at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am the
favourite of the crust."  Moreover, if an author set himself to invent
the naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home,
he would hardly light upon the device of the little troupe who, having
no footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of--candle-shades!
"It's jolly dull without you, mother," says a little girl who--gentlest
of the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes no
secret.  But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats of
metathesis, about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the
"stand-wash," the "sweeping-crosser," the "sewing chamine."  Genoese
peasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.
Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they should
by any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually.  A
London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her
pointing finger, and names it "bird."  Her brother, who wants to play
with a bronze Japanese lobster, ask "Will you please let me have that
tiger?"
At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the most
touching kind of newness.  Thus, a child of three asks you to save him.
How moving a word, and how freshly said!  He had heard of the "saving" of
other things of interest--especially chocolate creams taken for
safe-keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me to-day?  Nurse is
going out, will you save me, mother?"  The same little variant upon
common use is in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help in
the arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at your ease."
A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, was
taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from
her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer.  As
he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she
noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they
might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend.  "That is his bread
shop, and that is his book shop.  And that, mother," she said finally,
with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming parterre of
confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose,
is where he buys his sugar pigs."
In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intent
upon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector.  We have all