The child is unwieldy of thought, besides.  He cannot send the conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns:  “I send them their love,” “They sent me my love,” “I kissed their hand to me.”  If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a long effort.  His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician who cannot remember whether he began his sentence with “people” in the singular or the plural, and who finishes it otherwise than as he began it.  Points of grammar that are purely points of logic baffle a child completely.  He is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is in the use of his senses.

It is not true—­though it is generally said—­that a young child’s senses are quick.  This is one of the unverified ideas that commend themselves, one knows not why.  We have had experiments to compare the relative quickness of perception proved by men and women.  The same experiments with children would give curious results, but they can hardly, perhaps, be made, because the children would be not only slow to perceive but slow to announce the perception; so the moment would go by, and the game be lost.  Not even amateur conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of a child’s mind as does a little intricacy of grammar.

THE FIELDS

The pride of rustic life is the child’s form of caste-feeling.  The country child is the aristocrat; he has des relations suivies with game-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers.  He has a perfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or a suburb.  No essayist has so much feeling against terraces and villas.

As for imitation country—­the further suburb—­it is worse than town; it is a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child’s mind is hardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his affairs to think about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom of perpetual observation.  The child, compelled to walk, is the only unresting observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, and the tedious people.  He is bored as he will never be bored when a man.

He is at his best where, under the welcome stress and pressure of abundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neither in mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of his little gains.  On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where maize and grapes are carried in the botte, so usually are children expected in the field that bottes are made to the shape of a back and arms of five years old.  Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold no more than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans.  You may meet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score of times in the morning.  Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit sense of what is due to that labourer.