The Children

								

and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and the
growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft as
bloom.  Look then at the eyebrows themselves.  Their line is as definite
as in later life, but there is in the child the flush given by the
exceeding fineness of the delicate hairs.  Moreover, what becomes,
afterwards, of the length and the curl of the eyelash?  What is there in
growing up that is destructive of a finish so charming as this?
Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face "from the right or
from the left" when her portrait was a-painting.  She was an observant
woman, and liked to be lighted from the front.  It is a light from the
right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows.
And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing
and parting caress that infancy has given to his face.  The down will
then be found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red of
his cheek.  His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not
much harder than petals.
To return to the child in January.  It is his month for the laying up of
dreams.  No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even with
a majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs now
and then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a charm
and glory 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