The Children | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1911 John Lane edition.

THE CHILDREN

Contents
Fellow Travellers with a Bird, I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II.
Children in Midwinter That Pretty Person Out of Town Expression
Under the Early Stars The Man with Two Heads Children in Burlesque
Authorship Letters The Fields The Barren Shore The Boy Illness The
Young Children Fair and Brown Real Childhood

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, I.

To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed
of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the pre- occupations. You
cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not
compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but
the note alters. So with the uncovenated ways of a child you keep no
tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you
tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You are
the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of time to
your footing.
No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four

years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and
unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving
dolls." A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from
the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that
there was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother,
do be a lady frog." None ever said their good things before these
indeliberate authors. Even their own kind--children--have not preceded
them. No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five
whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different,
perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and
had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies.
"Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things
for you." "Do you work," she asked, "to buy the lovely puddin's?" Yes,
even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth
pursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don't like fat."
The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to be
soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned
in the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she should
forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject--her
wishes. "Do you know," she said, without loss of time, "what I should
like best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!" Her mother
was so overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no
offer as to