of an age to probe self, he would have detected within him a thousand
other germs of meditation; but the reflection of children is shapeless,
and the utmost they feel is the bitter aftertaste of that which, obscure
to them, the man later on calls indignation. Let us add that a child has
the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the
distant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. A
child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are
too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of
being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until
later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of
life. _Then_ he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path;
the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the
memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a
palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic,
and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism in
the man's. Experience is, however, various, and turns to good or evil
according to natural disposition. With the good it ripens, with the bad
it rots.

The child had run quite a quarter of a league, and walked another
quarter, when suddenly he felt the craving of hunger. A thought which
altogether eclipsed the hideous apparition on the hill occurred to him
forcibly--that he must eat. Happily there is in man a brute which serves
to lead him back to reality.

But what to eat, where to eat, how to eat?

He felt his pockets mechanically, well knowing that they were empty.
Then he quickened his steps, without knowing whither he was going. He
hastened towards a possible shelter. This faith in an inn is one of the