"A focus is a thing that looks like a mushroom, but if you eat it you will feel different to a mushroom."—SMALL GIRL.
Of course children's witticisms are always unconscious. They have taken the idiomatic quite literally: not quite caught our meaning; missed the right word in favour of another that is curiously like it in sound.
Reasonably enough the idiom is extremely troublesome to the child-mind. "The doctor says my mother has one foot in the grave," wrote a little girl the other day in a Composition Exercise. "That is not true. She has both feet in bed!" Again, if people will talk about "going it bald-headed," or about being "stony-hearted" or "iron-fisted" or "brazen-faced," and so on, they must naturally expect young children to accept the phraseology in its literal sense. Hence amusing misconceptions.
Again, as I say, it is often a question of not having quite got the right word. Having mumbled The Lord's Prayer every day for a year or so, we ultimately get the young Cockney who is found to be rendering "Lead us not into temptation" as "Lead us not into Thames Station"—a London police court shunned of all good costers and others. So too, taught that the Epiphany is a Manifestation, we condone readily the mistake of the little girl who, to her teacher's complete and abiding mystification, insisted that the Epiphany was "the-man-at-the-station!"
Owing its origin to the same sort of misconception is the genuinely funny answer of the boy who wrote, "The marriage customs of the ancient Greeks were that a man had only one wife, and this was called Monotony!"
Then, again, the child-mind is absolutely fresh and alert. It is to the adult mind as is the plastic clay to the baked brick. It is not already overlaid with impressions; it is not restricted in its elasticity by the petrifying effects of already-received preconceptions; it is refreshingly new and instantly impressionable. It is because of this that a youngster wrote: "A vacuum is nothing shut up in a box." It is because of this, too, that the little girl said: "The zebra is like a horse, only striped and used to illustrate the letter Z." Owing its origin to the same freshness of view, we get the following: Two children being awakened one morning and being told that they had a new little brother, were keen, as children are, to know whence and how he had come. "It must have been the milkman," said the girl. "Why the milkman?" asked her little brother. "Because it says on his cart, 'Families supplied,'" replied the sister. Not less quaintly ingenuous and fresh is the reply of a little chap in a Nature-study lesson. "Think," said the teacher, "of a little creature that wriggles about in the earth and sometimes comes to the top through a tiny hole." A small boy in a pinafore put up his hand joyously. "Well?" queried the teacher. "A worm," said the small boy. "Yes," said the teacher, "now think of another little creature that wriggles about in the earth and comes to the top through a small hole." Up went the joyous hand again. "Well?" asked the teacher. "Another worm!" shouted Tommy in triumph.
The workings of the child-mind, the quaint, homely wisdom and shrewdness that it not infrequently displays, and the pathos that—so far as the working-class children are concerned—it so often discovers, are engrossingly interesting. Take the case of the reply to the Inspector who, putting a "Mental Arithmetic" question, asked: "If I had three glasses of beer on this table and your father came in and drank one, how many would be left?" "None, sir," at once replied a very small urchin. "But you don't understand my question," retorted the inspector, proceeding to repeat it. This he did several times, always receiving the same unwavering assurance, "None, sir!" At last he said: "Ah, my boy, it is clear you don't know mental arithmetic." "But I know my father," answered the boy.
Again, there is the instance of the little chap driven into desperation and escaping by a wild stretch of the imagination. "Who made the world?" snapped out a rather testy inspector years ago to a class of very small boys. No answer. Several times he repeated the question, getting louder and more angry each time. At last a poor little fellow, kneading his eyes vigorously with his knuckles, blubbered out: "Please, sir, it was me. But I won't do it any more!" Which recalls to me the old Scotch chestnut: "Why did the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side, child?" "Because the puir man had been robbed already!" was the reply.
Much of the school-room humour purveyed for the delectation of us elders by the unconscious wits of the schoolroom is provoked by quaint pieces of "Composition." Of these I give later a number. One of the most amusing is that by a young lady in the Sixth Standard, who very frankly and faithfully expresses her views on "Schoolmasters." She writes so candidly, that I produce her essay here as a wholesome corrective to professional vanity and as an acute witness to the necessity to "see ourselves as others see us":—