The Griefs Of Childhood

These bitter sorrows of ohiklhood .' when sorrow ia all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the daya and weeks, and the space froni sunmer to sumnier seeins measureless. " Ah, niy child you will have real troubles to fret about by and by," is the consolation we have alniost all of ua had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children, since we have Deen gro wn up. w e have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs, above our little socks, when we lost sight of our inother or nurse in soms strange place ; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferinga of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen monients has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrevocably with the firnier texture of our youth and manhood ; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of childliood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to hiin, of what he liked and disliked wheu he was in frocks and trowsers, but with au intiinatc penotration, a revived consciousness of what he feit tben - when it was so long from one midsumraer to another ? What he feit wheu his school-fellows put him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere willf ulness ; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he did not know how to amuse hiinself, and feil from idleness into niischief, from mischief into dafiance, and from defiance into sulkiness ; or when his inother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that " half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already. Surely, if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectivoless conception of lite that gave the bitterness its intonsity, we should not poohpooh the griefs of our children. Childhóod has no forebodings ; but, then, it is soothed by no memories of out-lived sorrow. - Georgc Eliot.