PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND.
Holiness of infancy.
The wise men of the east at the feet of an infant, offering gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, is just a parable of what goes on in every house where there is a young child. All the hard and the harsh, the common and the disagreeable, is for the parents,—all the bright and beautiful for their child.
Pure joy.
Childhood’s joys are all pure gold.
Mischief.
“Of all the children that ever she see, he beat all for finding out new mischief,—the moment you make him understand he mustn’t do one thing, he’s right at another.”
Different temperaments.
“Mis’ Pennel ought to be trainin’ of her up to work,” said Mrs. Kittridge. “Sally could oversew and hem when she wa’ n’t more ’n three years old; nothin’ straightens out children like work. Mis’ Pennel she jest keeps that ar’ child to look at.”
“All children a’n’t alike, Mis’ Kittridge,” said Miss Roxy, sententiously. “This ’un a’n’t like your Sally. ‘A hen and a bumble-bee can’t be fetched up alike,’ fix it how you will!”
Child’s buoyancy.
All the efforts of Nature, during the early years of a healthy childhood, are bent on effacing and obliterating painful impressions, wiping out from each day the sorrows of the last, as the daily tide effaces the furrows on the seashore.
Unseen dangers.
Neither of them had known a doubt or a fear in that joyous trance of forbidden pleasure, which shadowed with so many fears the wiser and more far-seeing heads and hearts of the grown people; nor was there enough language yet in common between the two classes to make the little ones comprehend the risk they had run.
Perhaps our older brothers, in our Father’s house, look anxiously out when we are sailing gayly over life’s sea, over unknown depths, amid threatening monsters, but want words to tell us why what seems so bright is so dangerous.
Love of solitude.
The island was wholly solitary, and there is something to children quite delightful in feeling that they have a little, lonely world all to themselves. Childhood is itself such an enchanted island, separated by mysterious depths from the main land of nature, life, and reality.
Fate.
But babies will live, all the more when everybody says it is a pity they should. Life goes on as inexorably in this world as death.
Sensitive natures.
There are natures sent down into this harsh world so timorous, sensitive, and helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of indulgence and kindness is needed for their development,—like plants which the warmest shelf of the green-house and the most watchful care of the gardener alone can bring into flower.
Child’s reasoning.
“It’s curious what notions chil’en will get in their heads,” said Captain Kittridge. “They put this an’ that together and think it over, an’ come out with such queer things.”