none. So far as I know and can recall, there is no person more desirous of exactness, more perfectly downright in his wishes, than a child. He is compounded of amazement and wonder. He lives upon perpetual inquiry and the direct hope of finding an answer to his questions. Roundabout measures are not to his liking. Robin Hood's barn is not of his building. Postponements, circumlocutions, detours, insincerities, and subterfuges are not of his choice. They are foisted on him by a community of grown-ups who have in their turn in early years been forced by another set of indirect elders to compromise with life and their own longings.

The child is rarely in doubt as to what he wants, and does not conceal his longings. Fire pleases him, and he would put his hand on it if he were not intercepted. The moon meets with his approval, and if he had his own way and the direct fulfilment of his desires, the world would go moonless that night to bed. He is, so far as I know, the only absolutely whole-hearted explorer in the world; and those who later follow that profession and rise to eminence in it do so only because they have retained and pursued those old longings.

But though the child maintains this direction, now note carefully the course of his elders; mark how they offer him makeshifts and substitutes, a rattle in place of that thing Prometheus gave his eternal peace and godlike happiness to possess, and an apple in place of the mellow moon, which has been the mother of men's delights for many ages. have always found a child's tastes sound and in accordance with the gods. It is his elders who persistently pull him away from their company.

I

I had what is generally known as an old-fashioned bringing-up, and consequently soon learned to curb the outward manifestations of my curiosity. But denied speech, my hearing became only the more acute. Ah, how many hours I must have listened without a word, in the mere dear hope I would be able to pick up by chance the information I so much craved!

But mystification continued, and at what seemed to be an increasing ratio. Here in the world all about me chattering

adults spoke glibly of some very present cousin as once or even perhaps twice "removed," of another as looking exactly like "the other side of the house," of "chips" off "old blocks," of "watched pots" that "never boiled," and irrelevantly of the obvious impossibility of making "silk purses" out of "sows' ears." All this was bad enough, but they did, besides, sometimes resort to Latin phrases. My mother had a way of saying at the climax of a story, "Mirabile dictu!" "De gustibus" was frequent, and once an uncle of mine, when some one spoke the most interesting truths about another cousin not twice or three times, but finally, removed, said solemnly, holding up his hand, “Nil nisi bonum," which had the effect of stopping conversation altogether.

Once "Cousin Anne" conveyed most interestingly that "Cousin Matilda" did not approve of Mrs. Bartholomew's private school, preferring to send her own children for public instruction; and just when I was expecting to hear some good reason given, she broke off sensible speech abruptly and remarked to my mother, "Those look to me, Mary my dear, very much like sour grapes.'

What effect but of whimsical trickery could that have, I ask you, upon a downright mind like my own?

Once, too, in the very midst of one of the most enthralling tales I ever listened to, and for which I had renounced dolls and all other delights to stand in the background of the story, my eyes wide, my Cousin Louise seemed suddenly to lose her mind, leaned forward, and broke off the recital, and with the utter incoherency of the mentally unsound remarked, "Mary, have you forgotten that little pitchers have long ears?"

They did nothing more than stop talking about this fascinating subject, which had so completely thrown her off her balance, and, without further reference to it, turned their attention to me and became solicitous about my preferences, dolls and other matters of my usually negligible world.

There are children, I know, who soon capitulate, who early accept the ruling of their elders that the world is a place of utter unlikelihoods, that uncertainty

is its sole really stable and abiding characteristic; they simply accept the fact that life reflects itself on the retina not in the dignity of uprightness, but rather stands consistently and perpetually on its head. But I was not one of these. I maintained for a long while the balance of my true relation to the universe. Though my wings were clipped to the extent that I stood silent and quiet while other people talked, yet my heart was forever flying forth in wonderment and longing to know.

IT will be seen, then, what new disappointments were inevitable when, as I myself began to grow in reason and perspicacity, my elders, to offset this dangerous tendency, no longer mystiffed me only by mere habitual and thoughtless opaqueness, but with intent and forethought as well.

When I came to an age and understanding that enabled me to ask really leading questions whose answers would have been extremely useful for my purposes, there developed those age-old replies, devices thought of Heaven knows how many eons ago, for the express purpose of befogging the dawning intellect. If I demanded, for instance, with growing assurance and desire, what a certain thing might be or for what it was intended, the good-natured, but occult, reply was too often, I blush to state, "Whimwhams to make gooses' bridles"; or it might be, "Lay-overs for meddlers to make little girls ask questions"; or, worst of all, and employed, I think, only by the vulgar, "Curiosity killed a cat."

This was the age, too, of absurdities in riddles. One of them I recall vividly: "Why is a bat when it flies?"

Ah, why, indeed! The sincere effort and gray matter I have given to that sphinx-like problem! Why? Why? How I pondered! How I looked out of clear eyes hopefully for possible enlightenment! How I brought my very best powers to solve the unsolvable with all the sincerity in the world and more! "Why is a bat when it flies?" Pause, ponderation. "Why is a bat when it flies?" "Why is a bat when it flies?" "Why is a bat-when it flies?" I tried it in every light and at every speed and accent. I took a new run at it from this

angle and that; I put my head in my hands, and did more positive, independent, desperate essential thinking than I have probably even in my best moments done since. I fixed my eyes on the floor among footstools and humble things, and demanded of myself bitterly, "Why-is a bat when it flies?" I cast my eyes to high heaven and invoked high powers; "Why is a bat when it flies!" Oh, why? Baffled, bewildered, I still held fast to my desire to know, as Jacob to the angel, and would not let it go. "Why is a bat when it flies?"

But I only beat upon closed doors; I only grew more bewildered and confounded. founded. Finally, outdone, convinced of my inabilities, I went and confessed them. What was the answer to the unanswerable? And with great gravity, which I took to be sincere, they said, "Because the higher [pause], the fewer."

Then if you look bewildered (and you do), they offer it again gently, persuasively, "Because the higher, the fewer." And if you love truth to the point of saying you do not "see," they look surprised. "Why, don't you see?" They pause to give you one more chance to stand with the intelligent, then slowly, as though to make mistake impossible, "The higher-the fewer."

And it is at that moment, unless you happen to be a future Sappho or Cæsar, Napoleon, Lincoln, or Confucius, that you yield to the larger force. You abandon honesty and you pretend that you see. You fall innocently into the new trick and trap that they have laid for you. And they laugh anew at your pretense, these grown-ups of a certain type, and think it a joke; and no one but the recording angel is in all probability aware that there is a terrible dent in your shining armor; and the devil has had a tasty sauce added to one of his banqueting dishes.

It should not be supposed that I took life too seriously and had no sense of humor. Children are capable of fine and sound distinctions. The question concerning Zebedee's children I accepted as legitimate fun and asked for more. "Miss Netticoat in a white petticoat, and a red nose" was a delight; so, also, though he was so troublesome, was the polygamous gentleman traveling to

no, it was from-St. Ives; but these were never by me classed with the irrational bat. I could tell a further story of a bird and the chance for which I waited, with pathetic patience and utmost faith, to deposit salt on its tail, were not these experiences, however amusing, too painful. Suffice it to say I was a downright healthy and happily sincere child. I was good natured, and I had perhaps even more than the average child's trust in my elders.

My very own were, indeed, for the most part to be depended on; but let me but step even a little way out of the family circle, and I came into a province where "gooses" wore bridles, where curiosity was at times fatal to felines, and where bats flew without likelihood or syntax.

BUT if with proverbial phrases I was mystified, and if in many a particular instance I was with purpose aforethought moidered and perplexed by wholly evasive persons with a low estimate of wit, a still greater bewilderment awaited me in my initiation into those forms and customs whereby the average God-fearing community practises its religion. Here, it seemed, one came under the influence of a larger conspiracy, where an entire body and congregation of people united to give themselves over, horse, foot, deacons, and dragoons, to such mysteries as were utterly beyond the province of one's experience or best imagination. I pass over doctrinal matters and arguments. I refer rather only to the common religious parlance, the customary figures, similes, and to those general and varied contradictions in terms on which all religious bodies, it appears, are severally agreed.

If I limit myself solely to my Sunday-school experience, I find an amazing abundance of this material. The hymns, not to speak of the invocations and instruction, did so abound in the extraordinary and unlikely that from the opening one to the last, one's feet, so to speak, never once touched solid ground; mine, I mean, never once did, unless perhaps at that moment when I received, for no meritorious conduct that I could discover, one of the little gaily colored Sunday-school cards, the

one really bright spot in an otherwise windy and overcast experience.

We stood indoors, I mean, for instance, little children without umbrellas, and with the sincere hope that it would not rain, singing in enthusiastic chorus:

Mercy drops round us are falling; But for the showers we plead. We united in mysteries as to "lower lights" that were to be "kept burning" along some shore that never was or could be, and as to "sheaves" that were to be brought in, rejoicing, from I do not know whose fields; certainly not ours, as we owned none. To the accompaniment of a piano, little though we were and inexperienced in despair and desperation, we voiced that unthinkable longing, contrary, I believe, to every instinct of child nature, "Oh, to be nothing, nothing!"

I may confess that the rhythms I always enjoyed; the more and the more pronounced the merrier. "Whi-i-iter than the sno-o-ow," gave me positive pleasure, but was soon spoiled by the condition that was to be imposed before that rhythmic promised whiteness could be obtained. On this rock my floating, now derelict reason split utterly. I could not see how such a thing could possibly be accomplished, as was promised, yet I sang it in full voice and with great downrightness,

Wash me in the blood of the la-a-amb,
And I shall be whi-ter than sno-o-ow!

No one seemed either to remark or object to any of these extraordinary discrepancies. The grown-ups in charge of the matter neither explained nor reasoned with you. They simply began with a few chords on the Sunday-school piano, and then struck straight into all inconsistency and contradiction. After having carefully and at some pains taught you that a lie was one of the very worst sins, the leader of the Sundayschool, baton in hand, then indicated that the moment had come for you to join in asserting stoutly to music (he even insisted on the stoutness) that "Once you were blind, but now you could see," or he called on you to declare, "I am weary, so weary of sin," which had not the slightest foundation either in fact or probability.