remains alone, think of it, the only one after such a multitude! The feature that the children are romping about on a meadow points with little ambiguity to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the same association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche as having the wings of a butterfly. Perhaps some one will now object that, although the inimical impulses of children towards their brothers and sisters may well enough be admitted, how does the childish disposition arrive at such a height of wickedness as to wish death to a competitor or stronger playmate, as though all transgressions could be atoned for only by the death-punishment? Whoever talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of “being dead” has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, which the grown-up person, as all the myths concerning the Great Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in his conception. Fear of death is strange to the child; therefore it plays with the horrible word and threatens another child: “If you do that again you will die, as Francis died,” whereat the poor mother shudders, for perhaps she cannot forget that the great majority of mortals do not succeed in living beyond the years of childhood. It is still possible, even for a child eight years old, on returning from a museum of natural history, to say to its mother: “Mamma, I love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can always, always see you!” So little does the childish conception of being dead resemble our own.[CA] Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as “being gone,” not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by travelling, estrangement, or death. If, during the prehistoric years of a child, a nurse has been sent away and its mother has died a short while after, the two experiences, as is revealed by analysis, overlap in his memory. The fact that the child does not miss very intensely those who are absent has been realised by many a mother to her sorrow, after she has returned home after a summer journey of several weeks, and has been told upon inquiry: “The children have not asked for their mother a single time.” But if she really goes to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” the children seem at first to have forgotten her, and begin only _subsequently_ to remember the dead mother.