friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together,
the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows
and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather,
in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative
spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed
by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an
Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and
composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an
elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in
the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These
ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly
for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school
was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this
is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails
to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life
should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of
irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek
dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.

And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly,
"children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned
home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you
will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their
country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day