traveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten their journey,
and this is the perception of a child. Surely our own memories might
serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably missed the
principal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders to
furnish us with a historical remembrance for the future. It was not our
mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses,
of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through the
important moments of the passing of an Emperor at a different rate from
theirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of anything else
of interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic answers from
our parents' eyes, left us stragglers. We fell out of all ranks. Among
the sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best was
an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure. In good time we found the moon
in the sky, in good time the eclipse set in and made reasonable progress;
we kept up with everything.

It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselves
to the world, practised and alert. But it would be more to the purpose
that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings with
them. Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of the
tardiest. But we are apt to command instant obedience, stripped of the
little pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without. It is
not a child of ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creature
who has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be startled.

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of senses
and of an unprepared consciousness--this capacity for receiving a great
shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or three
appreciable moments--if we would know anything of the moments of a baby