What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon tea-cups! - from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game.When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal.
He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow.I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation.
You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal, were in the case of calves' feet jelly.It was hardly possible not to believe - and you may be sure, so far from trying, I did all I could to favour the illusion - that some part of it was hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of the golden rock.There, might some miniature RED BEARD await his hour; there, might one find the treasures of the FORTY THIEVES, and bewildered Cassim beating about the walls.And so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest.Believe me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because the cream dimmed the transparent fractures.
Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-minded children.It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, and the actions and the excitement to which it gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort of fable.And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about nothing and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving.It is a game, if you like, but not a game of play.You cannot tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can be justified on no rational theory.Even football, although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian nations.
To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted about the bringing up of children.Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their parents.What can they think of them? what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious.Were there ever such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling.
