This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict with the weariness of men.  But it is less tolerable that the energy of men should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at some time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of the poor.

Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved by children.  Three tiny girls were to be taught “old maid” to beguile the time.  One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another to play.  “Oh come,” she said, “and play with me at new maid.”

The time of falling asleep is a child’s immemorial and incalculable hour.  It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits.  The habit of prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity of some customs in mankind.  But if the enquirers who appeal to that beginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek no further.  See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in their thralldom.  Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction of their high antiquity weakens your hand.

Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense of mystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby.  The French sleep-song is the most romantic.  There is in it such a sound of history as must inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of the incalculable; and the songs themselves are old. Le Bon Roi Dagobert has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh.  The nurse knows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she herself slept to when a child.  The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in Le Pont a’ Avignon, is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the tete a tete of child and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night. Malbrook would be comparatively modern, were not all things that are sung to a drowsing child as distant as the day of Abraham.

If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some of them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs.  The affectionate races that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the white child.  Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropical night.  His closing eyes are filled with alien images.

THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS

It is generally understood in the family that the nurse who menaces a child, whether with the supernatural or with simple sweeps, lions, or tigers—­goes.  The rule is a right one, for the appeal to fear may possibly hurt a child; nevertheless, it oftener fails to hurt him.  If he is prone to fears, he will be helpless under their grasp, without the help of human tales.  The night will threaten him, the shadow will pursue, the dream will catch him; terror itself have him by the heart.  And terror, having made his pulses leap, knows how to use any thought, any shape, any image, to account to the child’s mind for the flight and tempest of his blood.  “The child shall not be frightened,” decrees ineffectual love; but though no man make him afraid, he is frightened.  Fear knows him well and finds him alone.