The rosy baby looked at me gravely, waited with a considering air, as she always did, taking it in, nodded gravely, and said decisively, “Ĕ!”
“Does Ruth want to go and be a missionary in Raratonga?”
“Ĕ!” with no less decision.
I saved her confidence in my good faith by substituting something else as good, and more immediately practicable, for the mysterious attractions I had offered, and used due caution thereafter in recording her answers.
It was evident that in a primitive way the little one was comparing and inferring not a little by this time. A week before, her grandmother had told her which was O on a set of letter cards she played with, and presently she showed Q with an inquiring cry: “What is this that looks so much like O and yet is not O?” It may be added that she always knew O afterwards, and picked up most of the other letters as easily—an evidence of the unnecessarily hard work we make of learning the letters by postponing them till the normal age of picking up the name of anything and everything is past.
She was, of course, sometimes quaintly misled in an inference by lack of knowledge. In the last week of the month I shut my eyes and asked her, “Where are aunty’s eyes?” The baby tried in vain to find them behind the lids, and then leaned over from my lap and looked carefully for the lost eyes on the floor!
I hardly think that memory is much developed at this age; the probability is that even the two year old remembers things only in glimpses—one here and one there, but nothing continuous: this is one of the great differences between his mind and ours. But our little girl plainly remembered some things for days. In the second week of the month her uncle showed her how he lifted the window sash, and four days after, catching sight of the finger handle, she tugged at it with impatient cries, trying to make the sash go up. A few days later, having a flower in her hand when her feet were bare, she began, with a sudden memory, to beg to have something done to her toes with it, and it proved that two or three weeks before her mother had stuck a flower between the fat toes.
All this month, even more than in the eleventh, she was incessantly busy in exploring and learning. She opened boxes, took things out, and put them back; worked with infinite diligence and seriousness at such matters as getting a rubber ring off a notebook I had stretched it round; investigated crannies, spaces under grates, doors ajar, with an undying curiosity.
She began to imitate our actions more: she tried to comb her hair, to put flowers into a vase, to mark on a paper with a pencil; she pulled at her toes and muttered, as if she were saying the piggy rhyme.
She had a distinct idea as to what constituted herself, and when she was asked, “Where is Ruth?” she did not indicate her whole body, but always seized her head in her hands with certainty and decision.