A still younger hand contributes a short story in which the hero returns to his home after a report of his death had been believed by his wife and family.  The last sentence is worth quoting:  “We will now,” says the author, “leave Mrs. White and her two children to enjoy the sudden appearance of Mr. White.”

Here is an editorial announcement:  “Ladies and gentlemen, every week at the end of the paper there will be a little article on the habits of the paper.”

On the whole, authorship does not seem to foster the quality of imagination.  Convention, during certain early years, may be a very strong motive—­not so much with children brought up strictly within its limits, perhaps, as with those who have had an exceptional freedom.  Against this, as a kind of childish bohemianism, there is, in one phase of childhood, a strong reaction.  To one child, brought up internationally, and with somewhat too much liberty amongst peasant play-mates and their games, in many dialects, eagerness to become like “other people,” and even like the other people of quite inferior fiction, grew to be almost a passion.  The desire was in time out-grown, but it cost the girl some years of her simplicity.  The style is not always the child.

LETTERS

The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody has sent him a box of chocolates.  The thanks tend to stiffen a child’s style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know.  They speak prose and know it.  But a young child possesses his words by a different tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them.  He is so little taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches the first that comes at random.  A little child to whom a peach was first revealed, whispered to his mother, “I like that kind of turnip.”  Compelled to write a letter, the child finds the word of daily life suddenly a stranger.

The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting.  Dickens, who used his eyes, remarked the contrast.  The hand of a child and his face are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard.

His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony.  The child chatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there is no inspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom he probably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of anyone, however vague and forgotten, without a mental image.  As like as not he pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut.  No boy wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut.  His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under these discouragements, but to write to her in an artless and childlike fashion.