Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this fellowship and the fellowship of more.
"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away for a party"--in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a _roll_ and wait for a fairy, and be a society."
We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love best to hear her in these fancyings.
"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."
I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan, her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a phalanx?
We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face, it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug stores, too.