water around your young tree, and patiently allow the young fruit to develop of its own juice from the root; your own task being, as the fruit forms, but to bring in all you can of air and sunshine upon it.  It must, as every mother and nurse knows, be coaxed to realise itself, to develop, to grow from its individual root.  It may be coaxed and trained.  But the main secret lies in encouraging it to grow, and, to that end, in pouring sunshine upon it and hoeing after each visitation of tears parentally induced.

Every child wants to grow.  Every child wants to learn.  During his first year or so of life he fights for bodily nutriment, almost ferociously.  From the age of two or thereabouts he valiantly essays the conquest of articulate speech, using it first to identify his father or his mother amid the common herd of Gentiles; next, to demand a more liberal and varied dietary; anon, as handmaid of his imperious will to learn.  This desire, still in the nursery, climbs—­like dissolution in Wordsworth’s sonnet—­from low to high:  from a craving to discover experimentally what the stomach will assimilate and what reject, up to a kingly debonair interest in teleology.  Our young gentleman is perfectly at ease in Sion.  He wants to know why soldiers are (or were) red, and if they were born so; whence bread and milk is derived, and would it be good manners to thank the neat cow for both; why mamma married papa, and—­that having been explained and thoughtfully accepted as the best possible arrangement—­still thoughtfully, not in the least censoriously, ‘why the All-Father has not married yet?’ He falls asleep weighing the eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in the parish.

His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of impulse and makes his discoveries with joy.  He passes to a school, which is supposed to exist for the purpose of answering these or cognate questions even before he asks them:  and behold, he is not happy!  Or, he is happy enough at play, or at doing in class the things that should not be done in class:  his master writes home that he suffers in his school work ’from having always more animal spirits than are required for his immediate purposes.’  What is the trouble?  You cannot explain it by home-sickness:  for it attacks day boys alike with boarders.  You cannot explain it by saying that all true learning involves ‘drudgery,’ unless you make that miserable word a mendicant and force it to beg the question.  ‘Drudgery’ is what you feel to be drudgery—­

     Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
     Makes that and th’ action fine.

—­and, anyhow, this child learned one language—­English, a most difficult one—­eagerly.  Of the nursery through which I passed only one sister wept while learning to read, and that was over a scholastic work entitled “Reading Without Tears.”