No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened and silenced by such an array of difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself comes to grief, a little later, with _The Bard_, and that even the wise and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines, “If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear.” “Oaten stop” was a mystery, and “eve” she thought—and was none the worse for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother. No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary, well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth’s little people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a book framed for their especial joy, like _The Children’s Treasury of English Song_, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the _Elegy_, and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved it a great deal less. It is healthy and natural for a child to be forcibly attracted by what she does not wholly comprehend; the music of words appeals very sweetly to childish ears, and their meaning comes later—comes often after the first keen unconscious pleasure is past. I once knew a tiny boy who so delighted in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over, and over, and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real man, described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the “Dacian mother,” or “a Roman holiday.” Historically and geographically, the boy’s mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent or sagacious in his enjoyment; only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of strong words, and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts. But what child who reads Cowper’s pretty remonstrance to his spaniel, and the spaniel’s neat reply, wants to be told in a succession of dismal notes that “allures” means “tempts,” that “remedy” means “cure,” that “killing time” means “wasting time,” that “destined” means “meant for,” and that “behest” means “command”? Cowper is one of the simplest of writers, and the little boys and girls who cannot be trusted unarmed in his company had better confine their reading to _Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable_, or to the veracious pages of _Mother Goose_. But perhaps the day is not far distant when even _Mother Goose_ will afford food for instruction and a fresh industry for authors, and when the hapless children of the dawning century will be confronted with a dozen highly abbreviated and unintelligible notes referring them to some Icelandic Saga or remote Indian epic for the bloody history of the _Three Blind Mice_. CONVERSATION IN NOVELS