For these were London children, and all the resources of civilisation had not been able to deprive them of that sense of proportion which we lose with age. The stars are small and of little importance, and even the sun is not much larger than a brandy-ball. But a golden pebble by the seashore is a treasure that a child may hold in its hand, and it is certain that never a grown-up one of us can own anything so surely. We may search our memories for sunsets and tresses of dead girls, but who would not give all their faded fragrance for one pink shell and the power to appreciate it? So it was that I had found the world wide and ugly and terrible, lacking the Aladdin’s lamp of imagination, which had shown the children that it was a place of treasure, with darkness to make the search exciting. They flitted about the beach like eager moths. Yet on these children Civilisation had worked with her utmost cunning, with her most recent resource. For they were little actors and actresses from Drury Lane, touring in a pantomime of their own; wise enough in the world’s ways to play grown-up characters with uncommon skill, and bred in the unreality of the footlights and the falsehood of grease-paints. Nevertheless, coming fresh from the elaborate make-belief of the theatre and the intoxicating applause, they ran down to the sea to find the diamonds and pearls that alone are real. If this is not wisdom I know not where wisdom lies, and, watching them, I could have laughed aloud at the thought of the critics who have told me that the life of the stage makes children unnatural. There are many wise and just people who do not like to see children acting, forgetting perhaps that mimicry is the keynote of all child’s play, and that nothing but this instinct leads babies to walk upright and to speak with their tongues. Whether they are on the stage or not, children are always borrowing the words and emotions of other people, and it is a part of the charm of childhood that through this mask of tricks and phrases the real child peeps always into the eyes and hearts of the elect.