ized childhood itself—and yet not so yens likely to achieve frequent expression. The fact is that the impulses crystallized in this story mostly fade into the light of common day a year or two before the dawn of that amount of mechanical articulacy which is necessary for a tangible expression of them; end they are therefore almost never expressed. Actually, do not happen to be acquainted with a single prose document of much scope which achieves the full expression, or any first-hand expression, of what in a normal, healthy child's mind and heart during that mysterious phase when butterflies, flowers, winging swallow, and white-tapped waves are twice as real as even a quite bearable parent, and incomparably more important—the phase before there Is any unshakable Tyranny of Things.
What is probably unusual about Barbara is the conspiracy of the circumstances which have made these two things, the phase and the necessary articulacy, overlap. She is precocious, and the phase may have lasted a year or two longer than it does in many. She is not excessively gregarious and has not been regimented in schools and groups; therefore nothing has as yet standardized her, or ironed out her spontaneity, or made her particularly ashamed of it She has been given plenty of
