unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrase
for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. "That," she said more
or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."

The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years
of mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a current word into
use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the
interruption of a pause for search. I have certainly detected, in
children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of
their own making is as good a communication as another, and as
intelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction among them
that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion
befalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings
forward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know how
irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to
belong to the common world.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a
child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much
confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple
adventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything
strange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trusts
genially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight of
sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing
himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets." This was
simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little
older. "Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said;
and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration,
answered, "because they are so big." There seemed to be no further
question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged