As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the Inspector, ‘What is an average?’ by saying ‘What the hen lays eggs on’. She had heard her mother say, “The hen lays so many eggs ‘on the average’ every week,” and had no doubt imagined a little myth about this ‘average’. Again, most of us know what queer renderings the child-mind has given to Scripture language. Mr. James Payn tells us that he knew a boy who for years substituted for the words, ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ ‘Harold be thy name’.[118] In this and similar cases it is not, as might be supposed, defective hearing—children hear words as a rule with great exactness—it is the impulse to give a familiar and significant rendering to what is strange and meaningless.[119] A friend of mine when a boy was accustomed on hearing the passage, ‘If I say peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ etc., to insert a pause after ‘peradventure,’ apprehending the passage in this wise: "If I say ‘Peradventure!’—the darkness," etc. In this way he turned the mysterious ‘peradventure’ into a mystic ‘open sesame,’ and added a thrilling touch of magic to the passage. My friend’s daughter tells me that on hearing the passage, “I ... visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, ... and show mercy unto thousands,” she construed the strange word ‘generation’ to mean an immense number like ‘billion,’ and was thus led to trouble herself about God’s seeming to be more cruel than kind.[120] ----- Footnote 118: In the _Illustrated London News_, 30th June, 1894. Footnote 119: Of course defective auditory apprehension may assist in these cases. Goltz gives an example from his own childhood. He took the words “Namen nennen Dich nicht” to be “Namen nenne Dich nicht,” and was sorely puzzled at the idea of bidding a name not to name itself. Footnote 120: Psalm cxxxix. and Second Commandment, Prayer-book version. ----- In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a child’s brain will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line of interpretation of its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little heroine, who knew the lines in _Strumpelpeter_— The doctor came and shook his head, And gave him nasty physic too— was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, “And will the doctor come and shook my head?”[121] It was so much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was carried out on the person of the patient. ----- Footnote 121: _The Invisible Playmate_, p. 35. -----