for the future.  It was not our mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses, of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up.  We lived through the important moments of the passing of an Emperor at a different rate from theirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of anything else of interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic answers from our parents’ eyes, left us stragglers.  We fell out of all ranks.  Among the sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best was an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure.  In good time we found the moon in the sky, in good time the eclipse set in and made reasonable progress; we kept up with everything.

It is too often required of children that they should adjust themselves to the world, practised and alert.  But it would be more to the purpose that the world should adjust itself to children in all its dealings with them.  Those who run and keep together have to run at the pace of the tardiest.  But we are apt to command instant obedience, stripped of the little pauses that a child, while very young, cannot act without.  It is not a child of ten or twelve that needs them so; it is the young creature who has but lately ceased to be a baby, slow to be startled.

We have but to consider all that it implies of the loitering of senses and of an unprepared consciousness—­this capacity for receiving a great shock from a noise and this perception of the shock after two or three appreciable moments—­if we would know anything of the moments of a baby

Even as we must learn that our time, when it is long, is too long for children, so must we learn that our time, when it is short, is too short for them.  When it is exceedingly short they cannot, without an unnatural effort, have any perception of it.  When children do not see the jokes of the elderly, and disappoint expectation in other ways, only less intimate, the reason is almost always there.  The child cannot turn in mid-career; he goes fast, but the impetus took place moments ago.

THE CHILD OF TUMULT

A poppy bud, packed into tight bundles by so hard and resolute a hand that the petals of the flower never afterwards lose the creases, is a type of the child.  Nothing but the unfolding, which is as yet in the non-existing future, can explain the manner of the close folding of character.  In both flower and child it looks much as though the process had been the reverse of what it was—­as though a finished and open thing had been folded up into the bud—­so plainly and certainly is the future implied, and the intention of compressing and folding-close made manifest.

With the other incidents of childish character, the crowd of impulses called “naughtiness” is perfectly perceptible—­it would seem heartless to say how soon.  The naughty child (who is often an angel of tenderness and charm, affectionate beyond the capacity of his fellows, and a very ascetic of penitence when the time comes) opens early his brief campaigns and raises the standard of revolt as soon as he is capable of the desperate joys of disobedience.