The facility, one might almost say skill, which children show in getting lost, is the keynote of childhood’s world. For they have no bearings among the unfamiliar, no principles for the solution of the unknown. In their accustomed realm they are as wise and canny and free from superstition as we are in ours. We, as grown-ups, have not acquired any magical release from fantasy. The only difference is that we are accustomed to make larger hazards of faith that things will repeat themselves, and that we have a wider experience to check off our novelties by. We have charted most of our world; we unfortunately have no longer any world to get lost in. To be sure, we have opened up perhaps an intangible world of philosophy and speculation, which childhood does not dream of, and heaven knows we can get lost there! But the thing is different. The adventure of childhood is to get lost here in this everyday world of common sense which is so familiar to us. To become really as little children we should have to get lost again here. The best substitute we can give ourselves is to keep exploring the new spiritual world in which we may find ourselves in youth and middle life, pushing out ever, as the child does, our fringe of mystery. And we can gain the gift of wonder, something that the child does not have. He is too busy drinking in the facts to wonder about them, or to wonder about what is beyond them. We may count ourselves fortunate, however, that we are able to retain the child’s virtue of curiosity, and transmute it into the beauty of spiritual wonder. It is facts and not theories that the child is curious about, and rightly. He cannot assimilate moral theories, nor can he assimilate any other kind of theories. It is his virtue to learn how the world runs; youth will be time enough to philosophize about that running. It is the immediate and the present that interest children, and they are omnivorous with regard to any facts about either. What they hear about the world they accept without question. We often think when we are telling them fairy stories or animal stories that we are exercising their poetic imagination; but from their point of view we are telling them sober facts about the world they live in. We are often surprised, too, at the apathy they show in the midst of wonders that we point out to them. They are wonders to us because we appreciate the labor or the genius that has produced them. In other words, we have added a value to them. But it is just this value which the child-mind does not get and can never get. To the child they are not surprising, but simply some more information about his world. All is grist that comes to the child’s mill. Everything serves to plot and track for him a new realm of things as they are.