A deeper and more thoughtful sympathy comes with years and reflective power. Thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes the awakener of this. ‘Are you old, mother?’ asked a boy of five. ‘Why?’ she answered. ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘the older you are the nearer you are to dying.’ This child had once before said he hoped his mother would not die before him, and this suggests that thought of his own forlorn condition was in his mind here: yet we may hope that there was something of disinterested concern too.[173] ----- Footnote 173: _Cf._ P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 87. ----- This early consideration frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist you in little household occupations; and though love of activity and the pleasure of imitating no doubt count for much in these cases, we can, I think, safely set down something to the wish to be of use. This inference seems justified by the fact that such practical helpfulness is not always imitative. A little boy of two years and one month happened to overhear his nurse say to herself: ‘I wish that Anne would remember to fill the nursery boiler’. “He listened, and presently trotted off; found the said Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: ‘Nanna, Nanna!’ (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed to the boiler, and added: ‘Go dare, go dare,’ so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade her.” With this practical ‘utilitarian’ sympathy there goes a quite charming wish to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. At an early age, too, a child tries to make himself agreeable by pretty and dainty courtesies. A little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: ‘Please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?’ Regard for another’s feelings was surely never more charmingly expressed than in the prayer that in rendering this little service the helper should not only be willing, but glad. Just as there are these sporadic growths of affectionate concern and wish to please in relation to the mother and others, so there is ample evidence of kindness to animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world.