The argumentative child is scarcely less trying than the Enfant Terrible.  Miss Sellon, the foundress of English sisterhoods, adopted and brought up in her convent at Devonport a little Irish waif who had been made an orphan by the outbreak of cholera in 1849.  The infant’s customs and manners, especially at table, were a perpetual trial to a community of refined old maids.  “Chew your food, Aileen,” said Miss Sellon.  “If you please, mother, the whale didn’t chew Jonah,” was the prompt reply of the little Romanist, who had been taught that the examples of Holy Writ were for our imitation.  Answers made in examinations I forbear, as a rule, to quote, but one I must give, because it so beautifully illustrates the value of ecclesiastical observances in our elementary schools:—­

Vicar.  “Now, my dear, do you know what happened on Ascension Day?”

Child.  “Yes, sir, please.  We had buns and a swing.”

Natural childhood should know nothing of social forms, and the coachman’s son who described his father’s master as “the man that rides in dad’s carriage,” showed a finely democratic instinct.  But the boastful child is a very unpleasant product of nature or of art.  “We’ve got a private master comes to teach us at home, but we ain’t proud, because Ma says it’s sinful,” quoth Morleena Kenwigs, under her mother’s instructions, when Nicholas Nickleby gave her French lessons.  The infant daughter of a country clergyman, drinking tea in the nursery of the episcopal Palace, boasted that at the Vicarage they had a hen which laid an egg every day.  “Oh, that’s nothing,” retorted the bishop’s daughter; “Papa lays a foundation-stone every week.”

The precocious child, even when thoroughly well-meaning, is a source of terror by virtue of its intense earnestness.  In the days when Maurice first discredited the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, some learned and theological people were discussing, in a country house near Oxford, the abstract credibility of endless pain.  Suddenly the child of the house (now its owner), who was playing on the hearth-rug, looked up and said, “But how am I to know that it isn’t hell already, and that I am not in it?”—­a question which threw a lurid light on his educational and disciplinary experiences.  Some of my readers will probably recollect the “Japanese Village” at Knightsbridge—­a pretty show of Oriental wares which was burnt down, just at the height of its popularity, a few years ago.  On the day of its destruction I was at the house of a famous financier, whose children had been to see the show only two days before.  One of them, an urchin of eight, immensely interested by the news of the fire, asked, not if the pretty things were burnt or the people hurt, but this one question, “Mamma, was it insured?” Verily, bon chat chasse de race.  The children of an excellent but unfortunate judge are said to have rushed one day into their mother’s drawing-room exclaiming,