present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for
construction or for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change. In
gregarious sports of skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to
Co-operation, for war or peace, as governor or governed: the little Maid
again, provident of her domestic destiny, takes with preference to Dolls."

Perhaps, however, we may give this anecdote, considering who it is that
relates it: "My first short-clothes were of yellow serge; or rather, I
should say, my first short-cloth, for the vesture was one and indivisible,
reaching from neck to ankle, a mere body with four limbs: of which fashion
how little could I then divine the architectural, how much less the moral
significance!"

More graceful is the following little picture: "On fine evenings I was
wont to carry forth my supper (bread-crumb boiled in milk), and eat it
out-of-doors. On the coping of the Orchard-wall, which I could reach by
climbing, or still more easily if Father Andreas would set up the
pruning-ladder, my porringer was placed: there, many a sunset, have I,
looking at the distant western Mountains, consumed, not without relish, my
evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of World's
expectation as Day died, were still a Hebrew Speech for me; nevertheless I
was looking at the fair illuminated Letters, and had an eye for their
gilding."

With "the little one's friendship for cattle and poultry" we shall not much
intermeddle. It may be that hereby he acquired a "certain deeper sympathy
with animated Nature:" but when, we would ask, saw any man, in a
collection of Biographical Documents, such a piece as this: "Impressive
enough (_bedeutungsvoll_) was it to hear, in early morning, the Swineherd's
horn; and know that so many hungry happy quadrupeds were, on all sides,