The joys of child-life in the Middle Ages only really began with the spring. We who have, in our comfortable houses, learned to rob winter of his terrors, have paid the price by losing much of that joy in the spring, which is so persistent a note in Middle High German poetry. One must realise how dreary the winter must have been in those mediæval castles to realise the “Wonne des Frühlings”—for mediæval souls—the children’s especially. Think of being shut up in semi-darkness all the winter; for there was no glass in the windows, and if the storms raged (and how they must have raged round the Wartburg!) there was nothing for it but to pull down the heavy wooden shutters, and crouch round the fire for light, and heat, and comfort. And sometimes the fire smoked, for mediæval chimneys did not “draw” well; and how little eyes must have smarted, and young nerves suffered! The heavy clothes, too, one had to wear in those cold draughty rooms must have been a torture to little bodies. No wonder they greeted the spring as the “Freudenzeit.” There was a great ceremony when they went out into the spring woods in search of the first violet. The coming of swallow and stork was treated as a great event. Many games, too, “came in” with the spring; and if a little boy of to-day could, by any chance, have a chat with a little boy of the Middle Ages, he would find that the same rigid convention which makes it impossible for a self-respecting lad to play marbles, when “it is the time” for spinning tops, or to spin tops when “it is the time” for rolling hoops, ruled in the Middle Ages. Except that it was not a “convention” then, but the result of hard necessity. Little girls play jack-stones and skip with ropes to-day at certain seasons, because their small ancestresses of seven or eight hundred years ago were forced to confine these games to this season. But do modern children get the same delight out of nature that the children of olden times did? Except the story of little Eoin in Mr. Pearse’s exquisite book of studies of Irish childlife, _Iosagan_, I know of nothing in modern literature that at all reminds one of the glorious passage in which Wolfram describes the effect of the bird-song on his child hero, Parzifal. I wish I could take some dear little boys and girls I know, a-roaming the spring woods with those little German children of so many centuries ago, and see them consult their flower-oracles, and catch butterflies, and bore holes in the birch-tree and drink the sweet sap, and learn to whistle a tune on a leaf, and look for strawberries in the glades. But, alas! space is limited, and I must try to get as much of a wide subject into it as possible.