These extracts show, in the four small mortals who had each spent the ten years of their lives in crowded streets, an almost poetic capacity, and the beginning of a power of nature sympathy that will be a source of unrecorded solace. The sights of the night impress many children, the sky seen for the first time uninterrupted by gas lamps.
“When I (aged eleven) looked into the sky one night you could hardly see any of the blue for it was light up with stars.”
“I saw a star shoot out of the sky and then it settled in a different place.”
“One night I kept awake and looked for the stars and saw the Big Bear of stars.”
“At night the moon looked as if it were a Queen and the stars were her Attendants.”
“The clouds are making way for the moon to come out.”
The sun, its rising and setting, is also frequently mentioned. One child had developed patriotism to such an extent as to write:—
“One day I looked up to the Sky and saw the sun was rising in the shape of the British Isles”.
Alas! What would the Kaiser think?
Another of my correspondents expressed surprise that “the moon came from where the sky touched the Earth,” an evidence of street-bound horizon.