Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from taking fright at the name of a bribe, the mother of the Child of Tumult has only to wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to give the shock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy, and change his passion at its height.

THE UNREADY

It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick.  They are, on the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, until advancing age teaches them agility.  This is not lack of sensitiveness, but mere length of process.  For instance, a child nearly newly born is cruelly startled by a sudden crash in the room—­a child who has never learnt to fear, and is merely overcome by the shock of sound; nevertheless, that shock of sound does not reach the conscious hearing or the nerves but after some moments, nor before some moments more is the sense of the shock expressed.  The sound travels to the remoteness and seclusion of the child’s consciousness, as the roar of a gun travels to listeners half a mile away.

So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eager with us of later age that no point of time is lost in its touches—­direct as the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered by trivialities; even so immediate is the communication of pain.  But you could count five between the prick of a surgeon’s instrument upon a baby’s arm and the little whimper that answers it.  The child is then too young, also, to refer the feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it.  Even when pain has groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to bring local tidings thither.  The baby does not turn his eyes in any degree towards his arm or towards the side that is so vexed with vaccination.  He looks in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random.

See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older child trudges after the nimbleness of a conjurer.  It is the greatest failure to take these little gobe-mouches to a good conjurer.  His successes leave them cold, for they had not yet understood what it was the good man meant to surprise them withal.  The amateur it is who really astonishes them.  They cannot come up even with your amateur beginner, performing at close quarters; whereas the master of his craft on a platform runs quite away at the outset from the lagging senses of his honest audience.

You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from under his ingenuous eyes, send him off in chase of it, and have it in its place and off again ten times before the little breathless boy has begun to perceive in what direction his sweets have been snatched.