W. V.

father?’”? She shows deep commiseration
for the poor and old; grey hairs and penury
are sad bed-fellows; but for the poor who
are not old I fear she feels little sympathy.
Perhaps we, or the conditions of life, are to
blame for this limitation of feeling, for when
we spoke to her of certain poor little girls
with no mothers, she rejoined: “Why don’t
you take them, then?” Our compassion
which stopped short of so simple a remedy
must have ‘seemed suspiciously like a
pretence.

To me one of the chief wonders of child-
hood has been the manner in which this
young person has picked up words, has
learned to apply them, has coined them for
herself, and has managed to equip herself
with a stock of quotations. When she was
yet little more than two and a half years old
she applied spontaneously the name Dapple-
grey to her first wooden horse. Then
Dapple-grey was pressed into guardianship
of her sleeping dolls, with this stimulative
quotation: “Brave dog, watching by the
baby’s bed.” There was some vacillation, I
recollect, as to whether it was a laburnum or

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