CHILD FRIENDS

"ARE you fond of children?" asks your hostess over the empty tea-cups.

Before you have time to think of a prudent answer you find yourself telling the truth; the bell is rung, the order given, there is a short pause, and then come sounds of a descent.

Then follows an ordeal. Beneath that well-brushed hair revolve the most cruel criticisms of your voice and manner and dress and general appearance. Those stiff-starched pinafores can feel the beating of hearts quickened by an eager longing for liberty. It is always difficult to face a hostile audience, and the difficulty increases in inverse ratio to the height of the heads you are addressing.

There are conventional openings, it is true, but they seldom lead far, and are seldom met with the urbane politeness of the young person who returned to one of the most usual-"I am five; and how old are you, Mrs. Brown?"

To step off the track might be instructive, but needs courage. Don't people look different from what you expect?" I once asked airily in answer to the steady gaze of a pair of large grey eyes. I had hit the very thought of their owner. "Yes," he answered with emphasis. But I have no wish at all to see myself as others see me an ordinary looking-glass is quite as much as I can stand. I hastily changed the subject.

Drawing-room intercourse is a trial on both sides. The visitor seeks in vain to think of something to say, and the child very likely often reaches the state of desperation of a small boy who had shown off all his parlour tricks and was told at last to say "good-bye" nicely to this lady. The exasperated sufferer got behind a chair, and thrusting his hand through the back of it said, with suppressed emotion, "Now go."

Tea-parties are pleasanter opportunities for intercourse, but even there the constraints of hospitality are felt. "When you're going to a party," a little girl of large experience once remarked, “you think it will be as nice as ever, and when you're there you wonder when it will be time to go home."

To stay in the house with child friends is a great but strenuous opportunity, and it may chance that as years increase upon you it is not easy to live up to it. You no longer enjoy being prepared to tell interminable stories at any time of the day from seven to seven. You do not appreciate the privilege of being the bear who is to be hunted from room to room and die, prodded severely all over in the middle of the hall. You do not want "the very best den of all-under the drawing-room sofa "-nor the big skin from the library right "over your head and everything.

Under these unfortunate circumstances a brilliant illumination came upon my own mind, and I invented a pretext for intercourse with my child friends that has succeeded so wonderfully that with great generosity I am about to offer it to other child lovers.

There is a large day-school for small boys and girls in the neighbourhood, and to this school I am in the habit of conducting some of the little people whose mothers and nurses are willing to trust to my escort. The work is light, and I am amply rewarded.

The dressing-room is a long room, with a row of chairs down one wall, there are pegs to hang coats and hats upon, and little cupboards to hold boots and shoes all down the opposite side. Between nine and half-past this room is all buzzing with children, all happy, busy, and natural, taking off their boots and putting them away and chattering freely together about the amusements of their leisure time or the interests of their lessons.

Here, for instance, is a small boy sitting on the ground taking off his boots, surrounded by a group of eager friends.

"Did you enjoy the Regatta yesterday, Charlie?" asks one. "No, it was a rotten Regatta."

A pause of consternation, then some one asks:

"Couldn't you see properly?"

"Not so very."

"I know," says a small boy: "you ate too many sweets, and your mother was cross."

"She wasn't. She gave me some chocolate herself, and I did eat a good lot; but she didn't mind."

Here a little girl sits down on the floor beside the melancholy wight, and murmurs coaxingly:

"Tell me why you didn't like it, Charlie. I promise I won't tell any of the others."

Charlie takes off his first boot and flings it on the floor. "There isn't nuffin to tell."

Repulse of Delilah.

"Leila Merry was at the Regatta," says another small maiden pensively, "and she said it was very nice."

"She's only a girl," flashes the misanthrope on the floor, who is now working away at the knot of his second boot. "Of course, a girl wouldn't mind.'

"Girls are every bit as betickler as boys," returns the child, with a toss of her pretty head.

"Well," persists Charlie, "they didn't none of them mindonly the boys. Everybody what went in half-price had to wear a ticket marked 'Child.' And Leila didn't mind a bit, 'cos I saw her. Child!" he repeats, with bitter emphasis, flinging down the other boot. Then a twinkle begins to light his sombre eyes. "Tim Hardy had to wear one, too. He was sicker'n me.' Then with a little chuckle: "He's almost ten-Child!”

The ringing of the prayer-bell breaks entertainment is over for this morning.

up the

group, and my

It is very pleasant to be out in the first freshness of a summer day, with a group of eager, happy children.

As we walked along, our convoy often grew to large proportions before we reached the school door.

We happened to pass a hawker's cart one morning, with wicker chairs and tables and rag rugs quivering all over it like some preposterous epidermis.

"I always like to see those things," said Edie Hankey confidentially.

I looked down with some surprise into the frank brown eyes i upraised to my face. In my own childhood these travelling mer

chants had been objects of terror and disquiet. I had always imagined them catching me, taking away my clothes, dressing me in rags, and rubbing me all over with the walnut-juice of the fairy story, so that even my own mother should not be able to recognise me and take me home again.

66

Why do you like them?" I inquired.

"They always remind me of Abraham and Esau, and those people in the Bible. Miss Dunstan told us once that they always went about all the time in caravans."

Knowing as I did that every teacher in the school was an Infallible Authority on every subject, I received this new knowledge with becoming meekness, and Edie went on:

"But they was even nicer, 'cos they used to have lots of camels and cows and sheep and goats and donkeys running beside. Ours don't scarcely ever have anything 'cept now and then a few poor old horses."

We had reached the door, and I fell back to let the children pass in, glad to keep my countenance hidden from them for a time.

Outside was standing a blonde cherub of about three, moving his rosy lips in a curious way.

"Has your big brother gone to school?" I asked, "and are you waiting for mamma to come out and take you home?"

He glanced searchingly at me, and I never felt more proud of passing an examination than when he answered:

"I'm metending they'se all alimuns in there."
"And are you an animal too, out here?"
"I'm a bear in the shunshine-eating a man."

I left him to his repast and rather hurriedly entered the school.

"What have you got for the Nature lesson this morning?" Edie was asking her friends. "Our class doesn't have to bring anything, we're going to talk about birds and we had to notice.'

"I found the most loveliest thing," proclaimed the not very big brother of the bear I left outside. "It was a hedgehog—a real hedgehog. Only mother said it had been dead for days and days, and she wouldn't even let me touch it. Wasn't it a pity? Miss Shaw would have been so surprised and she?"

pleased, wouldn't

The clang of the prayer-bell came in upon the regrets of the whole circle, and I reluctantly rose to go. But when I came to the door the sunshine was veiled by a sudden summer shower. I had come out without either cloak or umbrella, and Miss Dunstan, chancing to see my predicament, offered me the hospitality of her class-room till it should clear up again.

So after prayers I walked off along the corridor at the tail of a long file of small children and was given a chair facing the class.

At first some of my little friends smiled upon me encouragingly, but before long both they and Miss Dunstan were too much interested in their own discourse to remember my existence. The talk was of certain birds who do not usually perch on trees. "But, Miss Dunstan," complained my friend Edie. birds in our garden wouldn't never stay still for me to notice them. They would keep hopping about all the time."

"The

"You don't often see the birds we are going to talk about hopping on the ground," said Miss Dunstan. "Who knows what

One was singled out. "Yes, Ernest." Ernest, a small boy with a mat of yellow hair, evidently had something on his mind. "Flying," he said; and then hastily began, "Miss Dunstan, I saw such a queer bird yesterday.”

66

I longed to hear about the queer bird, but Miss Dunstan was adamant. Perhaps there will be time for you to tell us about it presently," she said. "Now we are talking about birds that we almost always see flying."

"That's worse than ever," exclaimed a bright-eyed little gypsy, "they're just flitter, flitter, and they're gone." Gradually we found out that there were swifts, swallows, house-martens, sand-martens, all fit subjects for conversation; that sand-martens built "down in the hole where the railway goes under the road." "I was looking at the sand-martens when you saw me with my brother, yesterday, Miss Dunstan," said one small boy in a tone of aggrieved explanation that made me wonder if Miss Dunstan could have strayed into imagining he was looking at the trains. House-martens, we learnt, built their little nests close by the bath-room window, and nurse said, "dirty little things; but they weren't dirty a bit, were they, Miss Dunstan ?"