To be on a villeggiatura with the children is to surprise them in ways and words not always evident in the London house. The narrow lodgings cause you to hear and overhear. Nothing is more curious to listen to than a young child’s dramatic voice. The child, being a boy, assumes a deep, strong, and ultra-masculine note, and a swagger in his walk, and gives himself the name of the tallest of his father’s friends. The tone is not only manly; it is a tone of affairs, and withal careless; it is intended to suggest business, and also the possession of a top-hat and a pipe, and is known in the family of the child as his “official voice.” One day it became more official than ever, and really more masculine than life; and it alternated with his own tones of three years old. In these, he asked with humility, “Will you let me go to heaven if I’m naughty? Will you?” Then he gave the reply in the tone of affairs, the official voice at its very best: “No, little boy, I won’t!” It was evident that the infant was not assuming the character of his father’s tallest friend this time, but had taken a rôle more exalted. His little sister of a year older seemed thoroughly to enjoy the humour of the situation. “Listen to him, mother. He’s trying to talk like God. He often does.”
Bulls are made by a less imaginative child who likes to find some reason for things—a girl. Out at the work of picking blackberries, she explains, “Those rather good ones were all bad, mother, so I ate them.” Being afraid of dogs, this little girl of four years old has all kinds of dodges to disguise her fear, which she has evidently resolved to keep to herself. She will set up a sudden song to distract attention from the fact that she is placing herself out of the dog’s way, and she will pretend to turn to gather a flower, while she watches the creature out of sight. On the other hand, prudence in regard to carts and bicycles is openly displayed, and the infants are zealous to warn one another. A rider and his horse are called briefly “a norseback.”
Children, who see more things than they have names for, show a fine courage in taking any words that seem likely to serve them, without wasting time in asking for the word in use. This enterprise is most active at three and four years, when children have more than they can say. So a child of those years running to pick up horse-chestnuts, for him a new species, calls after his mother a full description of what he has found, naming the things indifferently “dough-nuts” and “cocoa-nuts.” And another, having an anecdote to tell concerning the Thames and a little brook that joins it near the house, calls the first the “front-sea” and the second the “back-sea.” There is no intention of taking liberties with the names of things—only a cheerful resolve to go on in spite of obstacles. It is such a spirit of liberty as most of us have felt when we have dreamt of improvising a song or improvising a dance. The child improvises with such means as he has.
This is, of course, at the very early ages. A little later—at eight or nine—there is a very clear-headed sense of the value of words. So that a little girl of that age, told that she may buy some fruit, and wishing to know her limits in spending, asks, “What mustn’t it be more than?” For a child, who has not the word “maximum” at hand, nothing could be more precise and concise. Still later, there is a sweet brevity that looks almost like conscious expression, as when a boy writes from his first boarding school: “Whenever I can’t stop laughing I have only to think of home.”
Infinitely different as children are, they differ in nothing more than in the degree of generosity. The most sensitive of children is a little gay girl whose feelings are hurt with the greatest facility, and who seems, indeed, to have the susceptibilty of other ages as well as of her own—for instance, she cannot endure without a flush of pain to hear herself called fat. But she always brings her little wound to him who has wounded her. The first confidant she seeks is the offender. If you have laughed at her she will not hide her tears elsewhere than on your shoulder. She confesses by her exquisite action at one her poor vanity and her humility.
The worst of children in the country is their inveterate impulse to use death as their toy. Immediately on their discovery of some pretty insect, one tender child calls to the other “Dead it.”
Children do not look at the sky unless it is suggested to them to do so. When the sun dips to the narrow horizon of their stature, and comes to the level of their eyes, even then they are not greatly interested. Enormous clouds, erect, with the sun behind, do not gain their eyes. What is of annual interest is the dark. Having fallen asleep all the summer by daylight, and having awakened after sunrise, children find a stimulus of fun and fear in the autumn darkness outside the windows. There is a frolic with the unknown blackness, with the reflections, and with the country night.