“Being ignorant, you don’t know what the mirth in a child is—you” (scornfully) “who pretend to measure all people by their sense of humor. It’s akin to the bubbling music of the fountain of youth, and you do the child and the world a wrong when you stifle it. A child’s glee is as natural as sunshine, and carries no burden of knowledge; and that is the precious thing about it.”
“I’m sure that is true,” I said; but the Spirit did not heed me. She went on, in a voice that suggested Jessamine, but was not hers.
“Many people talk solemnly about the imagination of children, as though it were a thing that could be taught from books or prepared in laboratories. But children’s mischief, that is so often complained of, is the imaginations’ finest flower.”
“The idea pleases me. I shall make a note of it.”
“The very day,” continued the Spirit, “that you sat at table and talked learnedly about the minds of children and how to promote in them a love of the beautiful, your Jessamine had known a moment of joy. She had lain in the meadow and watched the thistledown take flight,—a myriad of those flimsy argosies. And she had fashioned a story about them, that they rise skyward to become the stuff that white clouds are made of. And the same day she asked you to tell her what it is the robins are so sorry about when they sing in the evening after the other birds have gone. Now the same small head that thought of those things contrived also the happy idea of cooking a doll’s dinner in the chafing dish,—an experiment that resulted, as you may remember, in a visit from both the doctor and the fire-insurance adjuster.”
My heart was wrung as I recalled the bandages on Jessamine’s slender brown arms.
“Yes, O Spirit!” I said. “I’m learning much. Pray tell me more!”
“We like very much for science to let us alone—”
“But hygiene—and all those life-saving things—”
“Oh, yes,” she said patronizingly; “they’re all very well in their way. It’s better for science to kill bugs than for the bugs to kill children. But I mean other kinds of sciences that are not nearly so useful—pedagogical and the like, that are trying to kill the microbe of play. Leave us, oh, leave us that!”