To a later phase of life, when a little girl’s vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realized—­a personal matter.  Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, “I took them just to appetize my hunger.”  As she betrayed a familiar knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on their way from school.  “I sometimes go in there, mother,” she confessed; “but I generally speculate outside.”

Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation.  Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages.  But sometimes a child’s deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders.  Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing.  The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony.  There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen:—­“My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt.  Such a unletterary article.  I cannot call it letterature.  I hope you will not write any more such unconventionan trash.”

This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister, and thought her forward for her age:  “I wish people knew just how old she is, mother, then they would know she is onward.  They can see she is pretty, but they can’t know she is such a onward baby.”

Thus speak the naturally unreluctant; but there are other children who in time betray a little consciousness and a slight mefiance as to where the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure.  These children may not be shy enough to suffer any self-checking in their talk, but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word of which they do not feel too sure.  A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enough to cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cup of tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feigned indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called “the infusion.”  “I’m afraid it’s bosh again, mother,” said the child; and then, in a half-whisper, “Is bosh right, or wash, mother?” She was not told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh.  The afternoon cup left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library “bosh” thenceforward.

CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER