A little child to whom a peach was first
revealed, whispered to his mother, "I like that kind of turnip."
Compelled to write a letter, the child finds the word of daily life
suddenly a stranger.
The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers
the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. Dickens, who
used his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of a child and his face
are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard.
His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony. The child
chatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there is no
inspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom he
probably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of anyone,
however vague and forgotten, without a mental image. As like as not he
pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut. No boy
wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut.
His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under these
discouragements, but to write to her in an artless and childlike fashion.
The child is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the
conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "I
send them their love," "They sent me my love," "I kissed their hand to
me." If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a
long effort.
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