STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 109 



various ways in wliicli a child will seek to evade the point in such 

 cases are truly marvelous, and show the childish intelligence at 

 its ablest. 



Sometimes the dreary " talking to," with its well-known deep 

 accusatory tone, its familiar pleadings, " How can you be so 

 naughty?" and the rest, is daringly ignored. After keeping up 

 an excellent appearance of listening, the small culprit proceeds in 

 the most artless way to talk about something more agreeable. 

 This is trying, but is not the worst. The deepest depth of mater- 

 nal humiliation is reached when a carefully prepared and solemnly 

 delivered homily is rewarded by a iu quoque in the shape of a cor- 

 rection of something in the delivery which offends the child's sense 

 of propriety. This befell one mother who, after talking seriously 

 to her little boy about some fault, was met with this remark : 

 " Mamma, when you talk you don't move your upper jaw." 



It is, of course, difficult to say how far a child's interruptions, 

 and what look like turnings of the conversation when receiving 

 rebuke, are the result of deliberate plotting. We know it is hard 

 to hold the young thoughts long on any subject, and the homily 

 makes a heavy demand in this respect, and its theme is apt to seem 

 dull to a child's lively brain. The thoughts will be sure to wander 

 then, and the rude interruptions and digressions may, after all, be 

 but the natural play of the young mind. I fear, however, that 

 design often has a hand here. The first digression to which the 

 weak disciplinarian succumbed may have been the result of a 

 spontaneous movement of child-thought ; but its success enables 

 the observant child to try it on a second time with artful aim. 



In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, 

 the small wits are busy discovering palliatives and exculpations. 

 Here we have the many ruses, often crude enough, by which the 

 little culprit tries to shake off moral responsibility, to deny the 

 authorship of the action found fault with. The blame is put on 

 anybody or anything. When he breaks something, say a cup, 

 and is scolded, he saves himself by saying it was because the cup 

 wasn't made strong enough, or because the maid put it too near 

 the edge of the table. There are clear indications of fatalistic 

 thought in these childish disclaimers. Things were so conditioned 

 that he could not help doing what he did. This fatalism betrays 

 itself in the childish ruses already referred to by which the ego 

 tries to screen itself shabbily by throwing responsibility on to the 

 bodily agents. This device is sometimes hit upon very early. A 

 wee child of two, when told not to cry, gasped out, " Elsie cry not 

 Elsie cry tears cry naughty tears." This, it must be allowed, is 



more plausible than C 's lame attempt to put off responsibility 



on his hands ; for our tears are in a sense apart from us, and in 

 the first years are wholly beyond control. 



