growing more and more reticent about its real thoughts as it gets
accustomed to talk to an appreciative audience. With weighing and
measuring, inspecting and reporting, exercising and rapid forcing, and
comparing, applauding and tabulating results, it is difficult to see
how children can escape self-consciousness and artificiality, and the
enthusiasts for "child study" are in danger of making the specimen of
the real child more and more rare and difficult to find, as
destructive sportsmen in a new country exterminate the choice species
of wild animals.

Too many questions put children on their guard or make them unreal;
they cannot give an account of what they think and what they mean and
how far they have understood, and the greater the anxiety shown to get
at their real mind the less are they either able or willing to make it
known; so it is the quieter and less active observers who see the
most, and those who observe most are best aware how little can be
known.

Yet there are some things which may serve as points of the compass,
especially in the transitional years when the features both of face
and character begin to accentuate themselves. One of these is the
level of friendships. There are some who look by instinct for the
friendship of those above them, and others habitually seek a lower
level, where there is no call to self-restraint. Boys who hang about
the stables, girls who like the conversation of servants; boys and
girls who make friends in sets at school, among the less desirable,
generally do so from a love of ease and dislike of that restraint and
effort which every higher friendship calls for; they can be _somebody_
at a very cheap cost where the standard of talk is not exacting,
whereas to be with those who are striving for the best in any station