90 THE PARADISE OF CHILDREN,

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“How provoking!” exclaimed Pandora, pouting her
lip. “I wish the great ugly box were out of the way! ”

“Q come, don’t think of it any more,” cried Epime-
theus. ‘Let us run out of doors, and have some nice
play with the other children.”

It is thousands of years since EHpimetheus and Pan-
dora were alive; and the world, nowadays, is a very
different sort of thing from what it was in their time.
Then, everybody was a child. There needed no fathers
and mothers to take care of the children; because there
was no danger, nor trouble of any kind, and no clothes
to be mended, and there was always plenty to eat and
drink. Whenever a child wanted his dinner, he found it
growing on a tree; and, if he looked at the tree in the
morning, he could see the expanding blossom of that
night’s supper; or, at eventide, he saw the tender bud of
to-morrow’s breakfast. It was a very pleasant life in-

zed. No labor to be done, no tasks to be studied;
nothing but sports and dances, and sweet voices of chil-
dren talking, or carolling like birds, or gushing out in
merry laughter, throughout the livelong day.

What was most wonderful of all, the children never
quarrelled among themselves; neither had they any ery-
ing fits; nor, since time first began, had a single one of
these little mortals ever gone apart into a corner, and
sulked. O, what a good time was that to be alive in!
The truth is, those ugly little winged monsters, called
Troubles, which are now almost as numerous as mosqul-
toes, had never yet been seen on the earth. It is proba-
ble that the very greatest disquietude which a child had