FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A
BIRD, I.
To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour,
disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations.
You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by
year, do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not
the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenated ways of a child
you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you
where you tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault.
You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of
time to your footing.
No man\'s fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four
years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and
unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving
dolls." A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from
the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there
was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be a
lady frog." None ever said their good things before these indeliberate
authors. Even their own kind--children--have not preceded them. No
child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose
father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse,
and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a
mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. "Do
you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things for
you." "Do you work," she asked, "to buy the lovely puddin\'s?" Yes,
even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth
pursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don\'t like fat."