“Dear Mamma, may we have jam for tea?  One of Papa’s judgments has been upheld in the Court of Appeal.”  An admirable story of commercial precocity reaches me from one of the many correspondents who have been good enough to write to me in connection with this book.  It may be commended to the promoters of that class of company which is specially affected by the widow, the orphan, and the curate.  Two small boys, walking down Tottenham Court Road, passed a tobacconist’s shop.  The bigger remarked, “I say, Bill, I’ve got a ha’penny, and, if you’ve got one too, we’ll have a penny smoke between us.”  Bill produced his copper, and Tommy diving into the shop, promptly reappeared with a penny cigar in his mouth.  The boys walked side by side for a few minutes, when the smaller mildly said, “I say, Tom, when am I to have a puff?  The weed’s half mine.”  “Oh, you shut up,” was the business-like reply.  “I’m the Chairman of this Company, and you are only a shareholder. You can spit.”

Mr. H.J.  Barker, who is, I believe, what Mr. Squeers called “A Educator of Youth,” has lately given us some pleasant echoes from the Board School.  A young moralist recorded his judgment, that it is not cruel to kill a turkey, “if only you take it into the backyard and use a sharp knife, and the turkey is yours!” Another dogmatized thus:  “Don’t teese cats, for firstly, it is wrong so to do; and 2nd, cats have clawses which is longer than people think.”  The following theory of the Bank Holiday would scarcely commend itself to that sound economist Sir John Lubbock:—­“The Banks shut up shop, so as people can’t put their money in, but has to spend it.”  So far the rude male:  it required the genius of feminine delicacy to define a Civil War as “one in which the military are unnecessarily and punctiliously civil or polite, often raising their helmets to each other before engaging in deadly combat.”

The joys of childhood are a theme on which a good deal of verse has been expended.  I am far from denying that they are real, but I contend that they commonly take a form which is quite inconsistent with poetry, and that the poet (like heaven) “lies about us in our infancy.”  “I wish every day in the year was a pot of jam,” was the obviously sincere exclamation of a fat little boy whom I knew, and whom Leech would have delighted to draw.  Two little London girls who had been sent by the kindness of the vicar’s wife to have “a happy day in the country,” narrating their experiences on their return, said, “Oh yes, mum, we did ’ave a ’appy day.  We saw two pigs killed and a gentleman buried.”  And the little boy who was asked if he thought he should like a hymn-book for his birthday present replied that “he thought he should like a hymn-book, but he knew he should like a squirt.”  A small cousin of mine, hearing his big brothers describe their experiences at a Public School, observed with unction, “If ever I have a fag of my own, I will stick pins into him.”  But now we are leaving childhood behind, and attaining to the riper joys of full-blooded boyhood.