pine bucket full is just as full as a hogshead. The ant has to tug just
as hard to carry a grain of corn as the Irishman does to carry a hod of
bricks. You can see the bran running out of Fanny's doll's arm, or
the cat putting her foot through Tom's new kite, without losing your
equanimity; but their hearts feel the pang of hopeless sorrow, or foiled
ambition, or bitter disappointment,--and the emotion is the thing in
question, not the event that caused it.

It is an additional disadvantage to children in their troubles that they
can never estimate the relations of things. They have no perspective.
All things are at equal distances from the point of sight. Life presents
to them neither foreground nor background, principal figure nor
subordinates, but only a plain spread of canvas on which one thing
stands out just as big and just as black as another. You classify your
_désagréments_. This is a mere temporary annoyance, and receives but a
passing thought. This is a life-long sorrow, but it is superficial; it
will drop off from you at the grave, be folded away with your cerements,
and leave no scar on your spirit. This thrusts its lancet into the
secret place where your soul abideth, but you know that it tortures only
to heal; it is recuperative, not destructive, and you will rise from it
to newness of life. But when little ones see a ripple in the current of
their joy, they do not know, they cannot tell, that it is only a pebble
breaking softly in upon the summer flow to toss a cool spray up into
the white bosom of the lilies, or to bathe the bending violets upon the
green and grateful bank. It seems to them as if the whole strong tide
is thrust fiercely and violently back, and hurled into a new channel,
chasmed in the rough, rent granite. It is impossible to calculate the
waste of grief and pathos which this incapacity causes. Fanny's doll
aforesaid is left too near the fire, and waxy tears roll down her ruddy
cheeks, to the utter ruin of her pretty face and her gay frock; and