FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, II.

The mere gathering of children’s language would be much like collecting together a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of their kind.  In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported them.  They do not, for example, say “me is;” their natural reply to “are you?” is “I are.”  One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have nothing but the nominative pronoun.  “Lift I up and let I see it raining,” she bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes, “Lift I up and let I see it not raining.”

An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered for her by maternal authority.  She wore the garments under protest, and with some resentment.  At the same time it was evident that she took no pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend.  He had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and the decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair—­“a brown tress.”  She had gravely heard the words as “a brown dress,” and she silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy.  The unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn.  She had a phrase for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable.  “That,” she said more or less after Sterne, “is a cotton-wool story.”

The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years of mere learning to speak.  The young child now takes a current word into use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the interruption of a pause for search.  I have certainly detected, in children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of their own making is as good a communication as another, and as intelligible.  There is even a general implicit conviction among them that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion befalls.  How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings forward some hitherto unheard?  The child would be surprised to know how irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to belong to the common world.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence in the chances of the hedge.  He goes free, a simple adventurer.  Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything strange or particularly expressive or descriptive.  The child trusts genially to his hearer.  A very young boy, excited by his first sight of sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, “summersets.”  This was simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little older.  “Why does he call those flowers summersets?” their mother said; and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration, answered, “because they are so big.”  There seemed to be no further question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged with meaning.