Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy’s life, not so much by slow degrees as by sudden and fitful accessions.  His speech is yet so childish that he chooses, for a toy, with blushes of pleasure, “a little duck what can walk”; but with a beautifully clear accent he greets his mother with the colloquial question, “Well, darling, do you know the latest?” “The what?” “The latest:  do you know the latest?” And then he tells his news, generally, it must be owned, with some reference to his own wrongs.  On another occasion the unexpected little phrase was varied; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousand of the side he favoured had fallen.  The child then came to his mother’s room with the question:  “Have you heard the saddest?” Moreover the “saddest” caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized him during the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection.  From such great causes arise such little things!  Some of his grief was for the nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his brother, whose sympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps did not spare his sensibilities.

The tumults of a little child’s passions of anger and grief, growing fewer as he grows older, rather increase than lessen in their painfulness.  There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulation of all the childish powers to the overwhelming compulsion of anger.  This is not temptation; the word is too weak for the assault of a child’s passion upon his will.  That little will is taken captive entirely, and before the child was seven he knew that it was so.  Such a consciousness leaves all babyhood behind and condemns the child to suffer.  For a certain passage of his life he is neither unconscious of evil, as he was, nor strong enough to resist it, as he will be.  The time of the subsiding of the tumult is by no means the least pitiable of the phases of human life.  Happily the recovery from each trouble is ready and sure; so that the child who had been abandoned to naughtiness with all his will in an entire consent to the gloomy possession of his anger, and who had later undergone a haggard repentance, has his captivity suddenly turned again, “like rivers in the south.”  “Forget it,” he had wept, in a kind of extremity of remorse; “forget it, darling, and don’t, don’t be sad;” and it is he, happily, who forgets.  The wasted look of his pale face is effaced by the touch of a single cheerful thought, and five short minutes can restore the ruin, as though a broken little German town should in the twinkling of an eye be restored as no architect could restore it—­should be made fresh, strong, and tight again, looking like a full box of toys, as a town was wont to look in the new days of old.