We grasp only one link of a chain whose beginning and end is eternity.  So we readily adjust ourselves to mystery, and are content.  We apply to everything inexplicable the test of partial view, and maintain our tranquillity.  We fall into the ranks, and march on, acquiescent, if not jubilant.  We hear the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry.  Stalwart forms fall by our side, and brawny arms are stricken.  Our own hopes bite the dust, our own hearts bury their dead; but we know that law is inexorable.  Effect must follow cause, and there is no happening without causation.  So, knowing ourselves to be only one small brigade of the army of the Lord, we defile through the passes of this narrow world, bearing aloft on our banner, and writing ever on our hearts, the divine consolation, “What thou knowest not now thou shalt know hereafter.”  This is an unspeakable tranquillizer and comforter, of which, woe is me! the little ones know nothing.  They have no underlying generalities on which to stand.  Law and logic and eternity are nothing to them.  They only know that it rains, and they will have to wait another week before they go a-fishing; and why couldn’t it have rained Friday just as well as Saturday? and it always does rain or something when I want to go anywhere,—­so, there!  And the frantic flood of tears comes up from outraged justice as well as from disappointed hope.  It is the flimsiest of all possible arguments to say that their sorrows are trifling, to talk about their little cares and trials.  These little things are great to little men and women.  A pine bucket full is just as full as a hogshead.  The ant has to tug just as hard to carry a grain of corn as the Irishman does to carry a hod of bricks.  You can see the bran running out of Fanny’s doll’s arm, or the cat putting her foot through Tom’s new kite, without losing your equanimity; but their hearts feel the pang of hopeless sorrow, or foiled ambition, or bitter disappointment,—­and the emotion is the thing in question, not the event that caused it.

It is an additional disadvantage to children in their troubles that they can never estimate the relations of things.  They have no perspective.  All things are at equal distances from the point of sight.  Life presents to them neither foreground nor background, principal figure nor subordinates, but only a plain spread of canvas on which one thing stands out just as big and just as black as another.  You classify your desagrements.  This is a mere temporary annoyance, and receives but a passing thought.  This is a life-long sorrow, but it is superficial; it will drop off from you at the grave, be folded away with your cerements, and leave no scar on your spirit.  This thrusts its lancet into the secret place where your soul abideth, but you know that it tortures only to heal; it is recuperative, not destructive, and you will rise from it to newness of life.  But when little ones see a ripple in the current of their joy, they do not know, they cannot tell, that