MARCH 255 



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 wUl they use to-day when 

 we've done with it? " has a flavour of oriental wisdom 

 about it difi&cult 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 Lon- 

 don 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 reenter the realms of our youth"; but few of us 

 seem ever to have listened at the nursery door, or to have 

 looked through the eyes of childhood into the make- 

 believe world it inhabits.' 



I knew a little boy once who used to go out into 

 Hyde Park when the soldiers were exercising, and on 

 his return give long and detailed accounts of the real 

 battles he had seen. His elder and less imaginative 

 brother would stand by in silent amazement at what 

 seemed to him absolute untruths. The child, in away, 



