Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous child assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience.  Not that illness is to be trusted to work so.  There is another child who in his brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally.  The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but an impossibility; but in any case it would be a failure.  You can bring the spoon to the child, but three nurses cannot make him drink.  This, then, is the occasion of the ultimate resistance.  He raises the standard of revolution, and casts every tradition and every precept to the wind on which it flies.  He has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursue him with a grotesque spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment, still more grotesque.  He is committed to the wild novelty of absolute refusal.  He not only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throws everything over.  Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilist laughs.

Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy.  “Am I unwell to-day, mother?” asks a child with all his faith and confidence at the highest point.

THE YOUNG CHILD

The infant of literature “wails” and wails feebly, with the invariability of a thing unproved and taken for granted.  Nothing, nevertheless, could be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child of man catches his first breath.  It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and brief, rather deep than shrill in tone.  With all deference to old moralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts up his new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and with much the same tone as some of the duck kind there.  He does not weep for some months to come.  His outcry soon becomes the human cry that is better known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy.  And if the infant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too young to be gay.  A child’s mirth, when at last it begins, is his first secret; you understand little of it.  The first smile (for the convulsive movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile) is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable.  It is accompanied by a single sound—­a sound that would be a monosyllable if it were articulate—­which is the utterance, though hardly the communication, of a private jollity.  That and that alone is the real beginning of human laughter.

From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for the first time, and as it were flickeringly, the child’s smile begins to grow definite and, gradually, more frequent.  By very slow degrees the secrecy passes away, and the dryness becomes more genial.  The child now smiles more openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing creature of so much prose and verse.  His laughter takes a long time to form.  The monosyllable grows louder, and then comes to be repeated with little catches of the breath.  The humour upon which he learns to laugh is that of something which approaches him quickly and then withdraws.  This is the first intelligible jest of jesting man.