“In age to wish for youth is full as vain,
    As for a youth to turn a child again.”

    Denham.

It is to be supposed that there are few men and women who do not occasionally look back on the days of their childhood with regret.  The responsibilities of age are sometimes so pressing, its duties so irksome, that the most contented mind must travel back with envy to a period when responsibilities were not, and duties were merely the simple rules of a pleasing game, the due keeping of which was sure to entail proportionate reward.

And this being so, and the delights of the Golden Age always being kept in the back of our mind, as a favourable contrast to the present state of things, it is hardly p. 226surprising that in course of time, the memory of the earlier days of our life is apt to become gilded and resplendent, and very unlike the simple, up and down April existence that was really ours.  The dull wet days, the lessons and the tears are all forgotten; it is the sunshine and the laughter and the play that remain.  But it by no means follows that such hoarding up of pleasant memories tends to make a man discontented with his lot; it would rather seem that they impart something of their good humour to the mind in which they are stored, so that the sunshine of former jolly days returns to yield an aftermath of more sober joy, and to help to light out our later years with a becoming glow of cheerfulness.  And on the other hand you will find that an habitually discontented man will be quite unwilling to own that the days of his youth, at all events, were happy.

There is no doubt that the most natural result of this glorification of our own childhood is a liking for children.  Seeing them naughty or good, at work or at play, our minds straightway step back through the p. 227span of years to greet a little one who behaved in just such a way; and the sympathetic understanding thus engendered, shows us the surest way, both to manage children of our own, and to make friends with those of others.

It is impossible to conceive a man, bearing his own childhood in mind, behaving unjustly or unkindly to a child.  For seeing that we perceive in every child a more or less distinct reflection of our own child nature, such conduct would be something suicidal.  How much of the child is still contained within our mature mind is difficult to judge—some people have much more than others.  And it is these people who can peel off their experience and knowledge like an athlete stripping for a race, and who can step out to play not only with the same spirit and ............