The Children

								

of tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feigned
indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the
infusion."  "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and
then, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?"  She was not
told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh.  The afternoon cup
left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"
thenceforward.

CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER

Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise to
see them blooming in winter.  Their tenderness, their down, their colour,
their fulness--which is like that of a thick rose or of a tight
grape--look out of season.  Children in the withering wind are like the
soft golden-pink roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathing
a southern calm on the north wind.  The child has something better than
warmth in the cold, something more subtly out of place and more
delicately contrary; and that is coolness.  To be cool in the cold is the
sign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien from the common conditions of
the world.  It is to have a naturally, and not an artificially, different
and separate climate.
We can all be more or less warm--with fur, with skating, with tea, with
fire, and with sleep--in the winter.  But the child is fresh in the wind,
and wakes cool from his dreams, dewy when there is hoar-frost everywhere
else; he is "more lovely and more temperate" than the summer day and than
the winter day alike.  He overcomes both heat and cold by another
climate, which is the climate of life; but that victory of life is more
delicate and more surprising in the tyranny of January.  By the sight and
the touch of children, we are, as it were, indulged with something finer
than a fruit or a flower in untimely bloom.  The childish bloom is always
untimely.  The fruit and flower will be common later on; the strawberries
will be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus dull in its day.  But
a child is a perpetual primeur.
Or rather he is not in truth always untimely.  Some few days in the year
are his own season--unnoticed days of March or April, soft, fresh and
equal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun.  Then he looks as
though he had his brief season, and ceases for a while to seem strange.
It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to
children; their likeness is so rife among annuals.  For man and woman we
are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously
their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without
renewel, without refrain.  But it is by an intelligible illusion that we
look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children--for a
waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall
not be final, shall not be fatal.  But every winter shows us how human
they are, and how they are little pilgrims and visitants among the things