STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 353 



One palliative of these early terrors remains to be touched on, 

 the instinct of sheltering or refuge-taking. The first manifesta- 

 tions of what is called the social nature of children are little more 

 than the reverse side of their timidity. A baby will cease crying 

 at night on hearing the familiar voice of mother or nurse, because 

 a vague sense of human companionship does away with the 

 misery of the black solitude. A frightened child probably knows 

 an ecstasy of bliss when folded in the protective embrace of a 

 mother's arms. Even the most timid of children never have the 

 full experience of terror so long as there is within reach the secure 

 base of all their reconnoitering excursions, the mother's skirts. 



Happy those little ones who have ever near them loving arms 

 within whose magic circle the oncoming of the cruel fit of terror 

 is instantly checked, giving place to a delicious calm! 



How unhappy those children must be who, timid and fearsome 

 by Nature, lack this refuge who are left much alone to wrestle 

 with their horrors as best they may, and are rudely repulsed 

 when they bear their heartquakings to others I would not ven- 

 ture to say. Still less should I care to suggest what is suffered 

 by those unfortunates who find in those about them not comfort, 

 assurance, support in their fearsome moments, but the worst 

 source of terror. To be brutal to these small, sensitive organisms, 

 to practice on their terrors, to take delight in exciting the wild 

 stare and wilder shriek of terror, this is perhaps one of the 

 strange things which make one believe in the old dogma that the 

 devil can enter into men and women. For here we seem to have 

 to do with a form of cruelty so exquisite, so contrary to the oldest 

 of instincts, that it is dishonoring to the savage and to the lower 

 animals to attempt to refer it to heredity. 



To dwell on such things, however, would be to go back to a 

 pessimistic view of childhood. It is undeniable that children are 

 exposed to indescribable misery when they are delivered into the 

 hands of a consummately cruel mother or nurse. Yet one may 

 hope that this sort of person is exceptional something of which 

 we can give no account save by saying that now and again in 

 sport Nature produces a monster, as if to show what she could do 

 if she did not choose more wisely and benignly to work within 

 the limitations of type. 



Thoreau, in relating some of his experiments in making maple sugar 

 when he got an ounce and a half of sugar from four quarts and a half pint 

 of sap says that he " had a dispute with father about the use of my mak- 

 ing this sugar when I knew it could be done, and might have bought sugar 

 cheaper at Holden's. He said it took me from my studies. I said I made 

 it my study, and felt as if I had been to a university." 



VOL. XLVII. 29 



