Things in general are so disproportionate to the child’s stature, so far from his organs of prehension, so much above his horizontal line of vision, so much ampler than his immediate surroundings, that there is, between him and all these big things, a gap to be filled only by a microcosm of playthings which give him his first object-lessons.  In proof of which let him see a lady richly dressed, he hardly notices her; let him see a doll in similar attire, he will be ravished with ecstasy.  As if to show that it was the disproportion of the sizes which unfitted him to notice the lady, the larger he grows the bigger he wants his toys, till, when his wish reaches to life-sizes, good-by to the trumpery, and onward with realities.[1]

[Footnote 1:  E. Seguin.]

My little nephew was prowling about my sitting-room during the absence of his nurse.  I was busy writing, and when he took up a delicate pearl opera-glass, I stopped his investigations with the time-honored, “No, no, dear, that’s for grown-up people.”

“Hasn’t it got any little-boy end?” he asked wistfully.

That “little-boy end” to things is sometimes just what we fail to give, even when we think we are straining every nerve to surround the child with pleasures.  For children really want to do the very same things that we want to do, and yet have constantly to be thwarted for their own good.  They would like to share all our pleasures; keep the same hours, eat the same food; but they are met on every side with the seemingly impertinent piece of dogmatism, “It isn’t good for little boys,” or “It isn’t nice for little girls.”

Robert Louis Stevenson shows, in his “Child’s Garden of Verses,” that he is one of the very few people who remember and appreciate this phase of childhood.  Could anything be more deliciously real than these verses?

  “In winter I get up at night,
  And dress by yellow candle light: 
  In summer, quite the other way,
  I have to go to bed by day;
  I have to go to bed and see
  The birds still hopping on the tree,
  And hear the grown-up people’s feet
  Still going past me on the street. 
  And does it not seem hard to you,
  That when the sky is clear and blue,
  And I should like so much to play,
  I have to go to bed by day?”

Mr. Hopkinson Smith has written a witty little monograph on this relation of parents and children.  I am glad to say, too, that it is addressed to fathers,—­that “left wing” of the family guard, which generally manages to retreat during any active engagement, leaving the command to the inferior officer.  This “left wing” is imposing on all full-dress parades, but when there is any fighting to be done it retires rapidly to the rear, and only wheels into line when the smoke of the conflict has passed out of the atmosphere.