noise he usually makes will do, as a kind of make-believe obedience to his
mother's command. He might, indeed, honestly answer his mother's angry
question by saying that he does _not_ know better than to make such a
noise. He does not know why the noise of the door should be disagreeable
to his mother. It is not disagreeable to _him_. On the contrary, it
is agreeable. Children always like noise, especially if they make it
themselves. And although Charlie has often been told that he must not make
any noise, the reason for this--namely, that though noise is a source of
pleasure, generally, to children, especially when they make it themselves,
it is almost always a source of annoyance and pain to grown persons--has
never really entered his mind so as to be actually comprehended us
a practical reality. His ideas in respect to the philosophy of the
transaction are, of course, exceedingly vague; but so far as he forms any
idea, it is that his mother's words are the expression of some mysterious
but unreasonable sensitiveness on her part, which awakens in her a spirit
of fault-finding and ill-humor that vents itself upon him in blaming him
for nothing at all; or, as he would express it more tersely, if not so
elegantly, that she is "very cross." In other words, the impression made
by the transaction upon his moral sense is that of wrong-doing on his
_mother's part_, and not at all on his own.

It is evident, when we thus look into the secret workings of this method
of curing children of their faults, that even when it is successful in
restraining certain kinds of outward misconduct, and is thus the means
of effecting some small amount of good, the injury which it does by its
reaction on the spirit of the child may be vastly greater, through the
irritation and ill-humor which it occasions, and the impairing of his
confidence in the justice and goodness of his mother. Before leaving this
illustration, it must be carefully observed that in the first-mentioned
case--namely, that of Georgie--the work of curing the fault in question is