perfect innocence, the blessed ignorance of wrong, so soon, so surely to be stained by the knowledge of sin. The divine faith in other's goodness so soon to be dimmed by distrust. The gay, onthinkin' happiness, so soon to be darkened by sorrow and anxiety—the rosy hopes so soon to fade away to the gray ashes of disappointment. Fair land! sunny time! so bright, so fleetin'—it seems as if we should treat its broken language, its strange fancies tenderly and reverently, rememberin' the lost time when we, too, were wandering in its enchanted gardens. Rememberin' that the gate of death must swing back before we can again enter a world of such purity, such beauty.
But we do not, we meet its pure and sweet unwisdom with our grim, rebukin' knowledge which we gained as Eve did, its innocent, guileless ways with the intolerance of our dry old customs, its broken fancies, its sweet romancin' with cold derision or the cruelty of punishment. It makes me fairly out of patience to think on't.
It stand to reason, when everything under the sun is new and strange to 'em, they can't git all to once the meanin' of every big word in the Dictionary, and mebby they will git things a little mixed sometimes. But how can they help it? Why, what if we should be dropped right down into a strange country where we had never sot our feet before and told to walk straight, and wuz punished every time we meandered, when we didn't know a step before us, or on each side on us, how could we help meanderin' a little, how could we help sometimes talkin' about the inhabitants of the world we wuz accustomed to, usin' its language?
What we would need would be to be sot in the right way agin, with patience, and over and over agin, and
