790 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stituted for the words " Hallowed be tliy name," " Harold be thy 

 name." * In this and similar cases it is not, as might be supposed, 

 defective hearing children hear words, as a rule, with great ex- 

 actness. It is the impulse to give a familiar and significant ren- 

 dering to what is strange and meaningless, f A friend of mine 

 could recall that when a boy he was accustomed, on hearing the 

 passage, " If I say peradventure the darkness," etc., to insert a 

 pause after " peradventure," apprehending the passage in this 

 wise : '' If I say * Peradventure ! ' the darkness is." In this way 

 he turned the mysterious " peradventure " into a mystic " Open 

 Sesame," and added a fine touch of romantic color to the passage. 

 My friend's daughter tells me that on hearing the passage " shew- 

 ing his mercy unto the thousands and visiting the sins of the 

 fathers to the third and fourth generation," she construed the 

 strange word " generation " to mean an immense number like 

 billions, and was thus led to trouble herself about God's seeming 

 to be more cruel than kind. 



In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a 

 child's brain will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line 

 of interpretation of its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little 

 girl, who knew the lines in Strumpelpeter 



" The doctor came and shook his head, 

 And gave him nasty physic too " 



was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, 

 " And will the doctor come and shook my head ? " J It was so 

 much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did 

 something this was done on the person of the patient. 



There is something of this same desire to get behind words in 

 children's word-play, as we call it, their discovery of odd affinities 

 of verbal sound, and their punning. Though, no doubt, this con- 

 tains a genuine element of childish fun, it betokens a more serious 

 trait also, a deep interest in word-sounds as such, and a curiosity 

 about their origin and purpose. It is difficult for grown-up peo- 

 ple to go back in thought to the attitude of the child-mind toward 

 verbal sounds. Just as children show " the innocence of the eye " 

 in seeing the colors of objects as they are and not as our habits of 

 interpretation tend to make them, so they show an innocence of 

 the ear, catching the intrinsic sensuous qualities of a word or a 

 group of words, in a way which has become impossible for us. 



* In The Illustrated London News, June 30, 1894. 



\ Of course, defective auditory apprehension may assist in these cases. Goltz gives an 

 example from his own childhood. He took the words " Namen nennen Dich nicht " to be 

 " Namen nenne Dich nicht," and was sorely puzzled at the idea of bidding a name not to 

 name itself. 



X The Invisible Playmate, p. 35. 



