The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is—­no, nothing feminine—­in this adult world.  “I’ve got a lotter than you,” is the word of a very young egotist.  An older child says, “I’d better go, bettern’t I, mother?” He calls a little space at the back of a London house, “the backy-garden.”  A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder at luncheon—­at tart-time:  “Father, I hope you will remember that I am the favourite of the crust.”  Moreover, if an author set himself to invent the naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he would hardly light upon the device of the little troupe who, having no footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of candle-shades.

“It’s jolly dull without you, mother,” says a little girl who—­gentlest of the gentle—­has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes no secret.  But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats of metathesis, about which she has doubts and which are involuntary:  the “stand-wash,” the “sweeping-crosser,” the “sewing chamine.”  Genoese peasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.

Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they should by any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually.  A London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her pointing finger, and names it “bird.”  Her brother, who wants to play with a bronze Japanese lobster, asks “Will you please let me have that tiger?”

At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the most touching kind of newness.  Thus, a child of three asks you to save him.  How moving a word, and how freshly said!  He had heard of the “saving” of other things of interest—­especially chocolate creams taken for safe-keeping—­and he asks, “Who is going to save me to-day?  Nurse is going out, will you save me, mother?” The same little variant upon common use is in another child’s courteous reply to a summons to help in the arrangement of some flowers, “I am quite at your ease.”

A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, was taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer.  As he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend.  “That is his bread shop, and that is his book shop.  And that, mother,” she said finally, with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming parterre of confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, “that, I suppose, is where he buys his sugar pigs.”

In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intent upon a certain quest—­the quest of a genuine collector.  We have all heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collecting cocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs her nothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names over all shop-windows.  No hoard was ever lighter than hers.  “I began three weeks ago next Monday, mother,” she says with precision, “and I have got thirty-nine.”  “Thirty-nine what?” “Smiths.”