It is only in the lesser naughtiness that he is master of himself.  The lesser the evil fit the more deliberate.  So that his mother, knowing herself to be not greatly feared, once tried to mimic the father’s voice with a menacing, “What’s that noise?” The child was persistently crying and roaring on an upper floor, in contumacy against his French nurse, when the baritone and threatening question was sent pealing up the stairs.  The child was heard to pause and listen and then to say to his nurse, “Ce n’est pas Monsieur; c’est Madame,” and then, without further loss of time, to resume the interrupted clamours.

Obviously, with a little creature of six years, there are two things mainly to be done—­to keep the delicate brain from the evil of the present excitement, especially the excitement of painful feeling, and to break the habit of passion.  Now that we know how certainly the special cells of the brain which are locally affected by pain and anger become hypertrophied by so much use, and all too ready for use in the future at the slightest stimulus, we can no longer slight the importance of habit.  Any means, then, that can succeed in separating a little child from the habit of anger does fruitful work for him in the helpless time of his childhood.  The work is not easy, but a little thought should make it easy for the elders to avoid the provocation which they—­who should ward off provocations—­are apt to bring about by sheer carelessness.  It is only in childhood that our race knows such physical abandonment to sorrow and tears, as a child’s despair; and the theatre with us must needs copy childhood if it would catch the note and action of a creature without hope.

THE CHILD OF SUBSIDING TUMULT

There is a certain year that is winged, as it were, against the flight of time; it does so move, and yet withstands time’s movement.  It is full of pauses that are due to the energy of change, has bounds and rebounds, and when it is most active then it is longest.  It is not long with languor.  It has room for remoteness, and leisure for oblivion.  It takes great excursions against time, and travels so as to enlarge its hours.  This certain year is any one of the early years of fully conscious life, and therefore it is of all the dates.  The child of Tumult has been living amply and changefully through such a year—­his eighth.  It is difficult to believe that his is a year of the self-same date as that of the adult, the men who do not breast their days.

For them is the inelastic, or but slightly elastic, movement of things.  Month matched with month shows a fairly equal length.  Men and women never travel far from yesterday; nor is their morrow in a distant light.  There is recognition and familiarity between their seasons.  But the Child of Tumult has infinite prospects in his year.  Forgetfulness and surprise set his east and his west at immeasurable distance.  His Lethe runs in the cheerful sun.  You look on your own little adult year, and in imagination enlarge it, because you know it to be the contemporary of his.  Even she who is quite old, if she have a vital fancy, may face a strange and great extent of a few years of her life still to come—­his years, the years she is to live at his side.