The Children

								

heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collecting
cocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs her
nothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names over all
shop-windows.  No hoard was ever lighter than hers.  "I began three weeks
ago next Monday, mother," she says with precision, "and I have got thirty-
nine."  "Thirty-nine what?"  "Smiths."

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, II.

The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collecting
together a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of their
kind.  In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the
rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported
them.  They do not, for example, say "me is;" their natural reply to "are
you?" is "I are."  One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have
nothing but the nominative pronoun.  "Lift I up and let I see it
raining," she bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes, "Lift I up
and let I see it not raining."
An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered for
her by maternal authority.  She wore the garments under protest, and with
some resentment.  At the same time it was evident that she took no
pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend.  He
had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and the
decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"a
brown tress."  She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and
she silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of
Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy.  The
unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn.  She had a phrase
for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable.  "That," she said more
or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."
The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years
of mere learning to speak.  The young child now takes a current word into
use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the
interruption of a pause for search.  I have certainly detected, in
children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of
their own making is as good a communication as another, and as
intelligible.  There is even a general implicit conviction among them
that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion
befalls.  How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings
forward some hitherto unheard?  The child would be surprised to know how
irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to
belong to the common world.
There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a
child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much
confidence in the chances of the hedge.  He goes free, a simple
adventurer.  Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything