runs in the cheerful sun. You look on your own little adult year, and in
imagination enlarge it, because you know it to be the contemporary of
his. Even she who is quite old, if she have a vital fancy, may face a
strange and great extent of a few years of her life still to come--his
years, the years she is to live at his side.

Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy's life, not so
much by slow degrees as by sudden and fitful accessions. His speech is
yet so childish that he chooses, for a toy, with blushes of pleasure, "a
little duck what can walk"; but with a beautifully clear accent he greets
his mother with the colloquial question, "Well, darling, do you know the
latest?" "The _what_?" "The latest: do you know the latest?" And then
he tells his news, generally, it must be owned, with some reference to
his own wrongs. On another occasion the unexpected little phrase was
varied; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousand of the
side he favoured had fallen. The child then came to his mother's room
with the question: "Have you heard the saddest?" Moreover the "saddest"
caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized him
during the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection. From
such great causes arise such little things! Some of his grief was for
the nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his brother, whose
sympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps did not spare his
sensibilities.

The tumults of a little child's passions of anger and grief, growing
fewer as he grows older, rather increase than lessen in their
painfulness. There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulation of
all the childish powers to the overwhelming compulsion of anger. This is
not temptation; the word is too weak for the assault of a child's passion
upon his will. That little will is taken captive entirely, and before