An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark the features of faces near him.  Whether because of the greater conspicuousness of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, he addresses his looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to the heads, not the faces, of his friends.  These are the ways of all infants, various in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the same things.  There are turns in a kitten’s play—­arched leapings and sidelong jumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances—­which the sacred kittens of Egypt used in their time.  But not more alike are these repetitions than the impulses of all young children learning to laugh.

In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much of his effect upon the world; not much of the effect of the world upon him.  Yet he is compelled to endure the reflex results, at least, of all that pleases, distresses, or oppresses the world.  That he should be obliged to suffer the moods of men is a more important thing than that men should be amused by his moods.  If he is saddened, that is certainly much more than that his elders should be gladdened.  It is doubtless hardly possible that children should go altogether free of human affairs.  They might, in mere justice, be spared the burden they bear ignorantly and simply when it is laid upon them, of such events and ill fortunes as may trouble our peace; but they cannot easily be spared the hearing of a disturbed voice or the sight of an altered face.  Alas! they are made to feel money-matters, and even this is not the worst.  There are unconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries, of which they do not know the names, but which change the faces where they look for smiles.  To such alterations children are sensitive even when they seem least accessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels of elders.  Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droop when their defied tyrants are dejected.

For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is a mere impulse and is easily disconcerted.  They are gay without knowing any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were, proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they are helpless and find no stay.  For this reason the merriest of all children are those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in a family nor in a public home by paid guardians, but in a place of charity, rightly named, where impartial, unalterable, and impersonal devotion has them in hand.  They endure an immeasurable loss, and are orphans, but they gain in perpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature.  The separate nest is nature’s, and the best; but it might be wished that the separate nest were less subject to moods.  The nurse has her private business, and when it does not prosper, and when the remote affairs of the governess go wrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration of the mishap.