Perhaps our older brothers, in our Father’s house, look anxiously out when we are sailing gayly over life’s sea, over unknown depths, amid threatening monsters, but want words to tell us why what seems so bright is so dangerous. * * * * * [Sidenote: Love of solitude.] The island was wholly solitary, and there is something to children quite delightful in feeling that they have a little, lonely world all to themselves. Childhood is itself such an enchanted island, separated by mysterious depths from the main land of nature, life, and reality. * * * * * [Sidenote: Fate.] But babies will live, all the more when everybody says it is a pity they should. Life goes on as inexorably in this world as death. * * * * * [Sidenote: Sensitive natures.] There are natures sent down into this harsh world so timorous, sensitive, and helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of indulgence and kindness is needed for their development,—like plants which the warmest shelf of the green-house and the most watchful care of the gardener alone can bring into flower. * * * * * [Sidenote: Child’s reasoning.] “It’s curious what notions chil’en will get in their heads,” said Captain Kittridge. “They put this an’ that together and think it over, an’ come out with such queer things.” THE CHIMNEY CORNER. [Sidenote: A child’s love.] The hearts of little children are easily gained, and their love is real and warm, and no true woman can become the object of it without feeling her own life made brighter. THE MAYFLOWER. [Sidenote: A child’s longing for sympathy.] But the feelings of grown-up children exist in the minds of little ones oftener than is supposed; and I had, even at this early day, the same keen sense of all that touched the heart wrong; the same longing for something which should touch it aright; the same discontent with latent, matter-of-course affection, and the same craving for sympathy, which has been the unprofitable fashion of this world in all ages. And no human being possessing such constitutionals has a better chance of being made unhappy by them than the backward, uninteresting, wrong-doing child. We can all sympathize, to some extent, with _men_ and _women_; but how few can go back to the sympathies of childhood; can understand the desolate insignificance of not being one of the _grown-up_ people; of being sent to bed, to be _out of the way_ in the evening, and to school, to be out of the way in the morning; of manifold similar grievances and distresses, which the child has no elocution to set forth, and the grown person no imagination to conceive. * * * * * [Sidenote: A child’s power.]