To pass from little girls to little boys is to go into quite another, an inferior, coarser world. No doubt there are wonderful little boys, but as a rule their wonderfulness consists in a precocious intellect: this kind doesn't appeal to me, so that if I were to say anything on the matter, it would be a prejudiced judgment. Even the ordinary civilised little boy, the nice little gentleman who is as much at home in the drawing-room as at his desk in the school-room or with a bat in the playing-field--even that harmless little person seems somehow unnatural, or denaturalised to my primitive taste. A result, I will have it, of improper treatment. He has been under the tap, too thoroughly scrubbed, boiled, strained and served up with melted butter and a sprig of parsley for ornament in a gilt-edged dish. I prefer him raw, and would rather have the street-Arab, if in town, and the unkempt, rough and tough cottage boy in the country. But take them civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow. And yet, incredible as it seems, that very quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes found in the boy and, with it, strange to say, the boy's proper mind and spirit. The child lover will meet with one of that kind once in ten years, or not so often--not oftener than a collector of butterflies will meet with a Camberwell Beauty. The miraculous little girl, we know, is not more uncommon than the Painted Lady, or White Admiral. And I will here give a picture of such a boy--the child associated in my mind with a spray of southernwood. And after this impression, I shall try to give one or two of ordinary little boys. These live in memory like the little girls I have written about, not, it will be seen, because of their boy nature, seeing that the boy has nothing miraculous, nothing to capture the mind and register an enduring impression in it, as in the case of the girl; but owing solely to some unusual circumstance in their lives--something adventitious.