250 MORE POT-POURRI 



delicately suggests the moral inferiority of square cabs to 

 hansoms. What can be better than a child's definition 

 of drawing : " First you think about something, and then 

 you draw a line round your think " ? 



' Sometimes their utterances betray character, as of the 

 little boy who, when the tiger's growls behind the sofa 

 had become too realistic for human endurance, burst forth 

 with " Mother ! mother ! don't growl so loud ; it frightens 

 granny " ; or the self-conscious infant who rushed to leave 

 the lion-house at the Zoo because, he said, " The lion is 

 peeping at baby " as if that wide-eyed majesty were 

 conscious of anything nearer than some Libyan desert 

 visible to his mental gaze. Often they are questions to 

 confound the wise. " Mother, does anyone have to-morrow 

 before us ? and will they use to-day when we've done 

 with it ? " has a flavour of Oriental wisdom about it 

 difficult to meet. Most grandparents can supply you 

 with genuine expressions and utterances drawn from 

 nursery life, and they are willing to do so on the smallest 

 encouragement ; it is in them that children find their 

 most intelligent sympathisers. We noticed two of the 

 most distinguished men of the present day in deep and 

 confidential discourse at a State entertainment in London 

 the other season. To the superficial observer they 

 appeared to be settling the affairs of the nation, but in 

 reality they were capping stories about their respective 

 youngest grandchildren, and their confidences lasted long 

 and late. 



' It seems strange that with an inexhaustible field of 

 observation open to everyone the children of fiction 

 should not be more lifelike and less sentimental than is 

 usually the case; but the subject is one that might be 

 indefinitely pursued. 



' Memory, it is true, is apt to play us false when we try 

 to re-enter the realms of our youth ; but few of us seem 



