In reply to the question, "Why do we cook our food?" one child replied: "There are five ways of cooking potatoes. We should die if we eat our food raw." A second pupil wrote: "Food digested is when we put it into our mouths, our teeth chews it, and our mouth drops it down into our body. We should not eat so much bone-making food as flesh-making and warmth-giving foods, for, if we did, we should have too many bones, and that would make us look funny."
In answer to the question, "Mention any occupations that are injurious to health?" one child's reply was: "Occupations which are injurious to health are carbonic acid gas, which is impure blood." Another responded: "A stone-mason's work is injurious, because when he is chipping, he breathes in all the little chips, and they are taken into the lungs." A third advanced the theory that "A boot-maker's trade is very injurious, because they press the boots against the thorax, and therefore it presses the thorax in, and it touches the heart, and if they do not die, they are cripples for life."
Finally, here is an extract from an essay on "The Moon," which—in defiance of its title—affords some very interesting glimpses of sublunary home life:—"To look at the white moon shinin threw your winder at night, sitting on the edge of the bed, and lissin to your father and mothers knives and forks rattlin on their plates while they are getting their nice suppers, is the prittist site you ever seed. When its liver and hunyens there a having, you can smell it all the way upstairs. It looks very brite and nearly all white. Once when they was a having fried fish and potaters I crept out of my bed-room to the top of the stairs all in the dark, just so as to have a better lissen and a nearer smell. I forget whether there was a moon that night. I don't think as there was, cose I got to the top of the stares afore I knew I was there, and I tumbled right down to the bottom of the stares, a bursting open the door at the bottom, and rolling into the room nearly as far as the supper table. My father thote of giving me the stick for it, but he let my mother give me a bit of fish on some bread, and told me to skittle off to bed again. I am sure there was not no moon, else I should have seed there wasn't a top stare when I put my foot out so slow. I only skratted my left eye and ear a bit with that last bump at the bottom, witch was a hard one, Stares are steeper than girls think, speshilly where the corner is."
CHILDREN'S STORIES.
The editor of a London literary journal was recently inviting men and women in prominent positions in public life to name for publication the books of their childhood. So far as I observed, none of the half-hundred or more who responded gave Blue Beard, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, or any of the others in the same category that follow here. But I am none the less convinced that these old-time favourites, not yet unknown, though familiar to city children in the present generation mainly in their variegated and fantastic Christmas pantomime form, were in Scotland and England alike in the last century more essentially the books of childhood than any others known and read beyond the walls of the school-room. The travelling stationers and packmen carried them in their thousands, in chapbook form, into even the most remote parts of the country, where they were bartered for and explored with avidity. In many quarters, indeed, they were so familiar fifty years ago that the books on occasions could be dispensed with, and the elder members of families would recite the stories from memory for the delectation of the younger fry, when all foregathered in a crescent before the kitchen fire to wear out the long winter evenings. In this manner, under the dim-flickering light of an "oilie cruizie," in a straggling village in Perthshire, did I learn first of Blue Beard and Jack the Giant Killer, and many another hero of chapbook literature. And my experience, I am sure, was by no means singular. Rather, I feel certain that while telling thus my own, I am expressing no less truly the experience of many thousands of men and women now beyond middle life who similarly were born and bred in any rural parish in Scotland. And, oh, the weird fascination of it all! There was no doubting of Blue Beard's reality; no hesitation in accepting as actual every extraordinary feat of Jack the Giant Killer. Both were as real in our innocent imagination as is now the personality of King Edward the Seventh. It never occurred to us then, as it does now, that the story of Blue Beard is only a gory and fantastic parody of the history of Eden—a temptation, a fall, and a rescue. And we had no concern about authorship. We did not know then, as we do now—and as few are yet aware, perhaps—that Blue Beard, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood were all written by Charles Perrault, a celebrated French literateur and poet, who was born in Paris in 1628, and died there in 1703. And to have been told, as we have recently been, on authority that Perrault's Blue Beard—the Comte Gilles de Rais—was no mere wife-killer (though he was such) but from his youth upwards, in the fifteenth century, a man of exquisite culture, and a soldier under Joan of Arc, would have made for disillusionment so emphatic as to have shred the tale of a serious amount of its blood-curdling charm. As I can still enjoy reading them, it is a real pleasure to embrace here these old-time examples of child literature. Such as follow—and all the more popular will be found in the list—are printed verbatim from the chapbooks now unobtainable, except at a ransom price—and without individual comment—none being required.
BLUE BEARD.
There was, some time ago, a gentleman who was extremely rich: he had elegant town and country houses; his dishes and plates were of gold or silver; his rooms were hung with damask; his chairs and sofas were covered with the richest silks; and his carriages were all magnificently gilt with gold.