"You are near my heart—expect no treachery," a most solemn surety; while the hand sent from the heart towards the visitor seems to say—
"I extend hospitality to you."
The "attingere extremis digitis" of the Romans expressed the same temperate conduct.
But greeting by gesture and hand-clapping still live, and are discovered in the first lessons given by a mother to her babe.
"Clap hands, papa comes,"
and
"Pat a cake, pat a cake, my little man,
Yes, I will, mother, as fast as I can"
have a universal significance in Child Land. Unfortunately this survival of hand-clapping, a vestige of a habit belonging to primitive people, does not begin and end in our modern nursery.
"When I was a child I spake as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things," is a resolve daily forgotten.
In the theatre, when our sentiment is awakened by the craft of the stage player, we show approbation by a round of hand-clapping not one whit less savage than the habit of the Uvinza grandee or the good-morning among the Walunga tribe.