“It must be the fault of the school,” said my mother, shaking her head. “It is the necessity of the school, and its virtue, my Kate. Let any one of these wonderful children—wonderful as you thought Sisty himself—stay at home, and you will see its head grow bigger and bigger, and its body thinner and thinner—Eh, Mr Squills?—till the mind take all nourishment from the frame, and the frame, in turn, stint or make sickly the mind. You see that noble oak from the window—if the Chinese had brought it up, it would have been a tree in miniature at five years old, and at an hundred, you would have set it in a flower-pot on your table, no bigger than it was at five—a curiosity for its matureness at one age—a show for its diminutiveness at the other. No! the ordeal for talent is school; restore the stunted mannikin to the growing child, and then let the child if it can, healthily, hardily, naturally, work its slow way up into greatness. If greatness be denied it, it will at least be a man, and that is better than to be a little Johnny Styles all its life—an oak in a pill-box.” At that moment I rushed into the room, glowing and panting, health on my cheek, vigour in my limbs—all childhood at my heart. “Oh! mamma, I have got up the kite—so high!—come and see. Do come, papa.” “Certainly,” said my father; “only, don’t cry so loud—kites make no noise in rising—yet, you see how they soar above the world. Come, Kate, where is my hat? Ah—thank you, my boy.” “Kitty,” said my father, looking at the kite which, attached by its string to the peg I had stuck into the ground, rested calm in the sky, “never fear but what our kite shall fly as high; only, the human soul has stronger instincts to mount upward than a few sheets of paper on a framework of lath. But, observe, that to prevent its being lost in the freedom of space, we must attach it lightly to earth; and, observe again, my dear, that the higher it soars, the more string we must give it.” _Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._ ----- Footnote 1: “On the French Revolutions,” Nos. I.–V. Jan.–May, 1831. Footnote 2: 5,468,000 in 1836, which must be at least 6,000,000 in 1848.—_Statistique de la France_—(_Agriculture_, 84–89.) Footnote 3: _Democratie Pacifique_, 1st March 1848. Footnote 4: _Democratie Pacifique_, 1st March, 1848, p. 1. Footnote 5: Ibid. Footnote 6: _Democratie Pacifique_, March 1, 1848. Footnote 7: _Democratie Pacifique_, March 2, 1848. Footnote 8: The present state of the finances of France is thus explained by the Finance Minister:—