How peculiar children are in their choice of a friend! Either he is the nicest or the finest, the quietest or the noisiest, the best or the worst, the strongest or the weakest. They prefer one whose traits are clearly and sharply defined, rather than one who is neither one thing nor the other. There must be something about the friend that they can admire; he must excel them in something. But it is not a bar to friendship that they excel the other in something. Let no one say that it is an easy matter to read the souls of children! That their emotions are simple, that their soul’s an open book! We can discover all the puzzling roots of love, even in the friendships of children, _e.g._, sympathy, cruelty, desire, humility, and subjection. It is my belief that we adults cannot love with the love we were capable of in childhood. We cannot hate so, cannot be so resentful, and cannot be so self-sacrificing. Alas! even our emotions become pallid with the years and can make a show of colour only with the aid of memory. Let us watch a child that has entered into a close friendship. Is it not playing the same game that we adults later on designate as love? Have we forgotten the feverish impatience with which we awaited the hour of the friend’s coming and how jealous we were if he stopped to converse with another? How we hated him then and how terribly unhappy we were? How we would have loved to cry aloud, if we had not been ashamed to betray such weakness. Have we forgotten how the hours flew when we were playing together, how we whispered dreadful and mysterious things to each other in the twilight, how passionately we embraced each other, and kissed, and how ready we were to give up our little treasures to our friends? There is but one time that resembles this friendship:--the time when a happy love makes a wooer a sweet child again. Even in a child’s soul the hunger for love cries aloud and will not be stilled. For a love that is more than a love of parents, for a love that is touched with that dark power which at a later period shapes the life of man to its will. Oh! blessed time, in which our yearning for a second human being is so easily gratified! Blessed time, in which we do not yet feel the hot breath of burning desires when the arm of a beloved being entwines us, in which the threatening fist of Destiny does not pin us to the ground at the moment when we think we are plucking down the sky! The mirror of our soul still reflects pure innocence; we do not yet suspect that the passions that set the waters in motion must also stir up the muddy ooze that lies at the bottom.