I am happy to say that she took my advice. She was soon fast asleep,
and the next morning she had forgotten the wrong over which she had
been unhealthily brooding the night before.

2. _Stories dealing too much with sarcasm and satire_. These
are weapons which are too sharply polished, and therefore too
dangerous, to place in the hands of children. For here again, as in
the case of analysis, they can only have a very incomplete conception
of the case. They do not know the real cause which produces the
apparently ridiculous appearance, and it is only the abnormally gifted
child or grown-up person who discovers this by instinct. It takes a
lifetime to arrive at the position described in Sterne's words: "I
would not have let fallen an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable
presence of misery to be entitled to all the with which Rabelais has
ever scattered."

I will hasten to add that I should not wish children to have their
sympathy too much drawn out, of their emotions kindled too much to
pity, because this would be neither healthy nor helpful to themselves
or others. I only want to protect children from the dangerous
critical attitude induced by the use of satire which sacrifices too
much of the atmosphere of trust and belief in human beings which ought
to be an essential of child life. By indulging in satire, the sense of
kindness in children would become perverted, their sympathy cramped,
and they themselves would be old before their time. We have an
excellent example of this in Hans Christian Andersen's "Snow Queen."

When Kay gets the piece of broken mirror into his eye, he no longer
sees the world from the normal child's point of view; he can no longer