Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/59

 Rh, stopped short at the portals of reconstruction.

It is hard to attune our minds to a correct appreciation of such incidents, when the clocks belong to us, and the child doesn't. It is hard to be told that our pendulums are a necessary element, which we do wrong to begrudge, in the training of a boy's observation. All modern writers upon children unite in denouncing the word "don't," as implying upon every occasion a censure which is often unmerited. But this protest reminds me of the little girl who, being told by her father she must not say "I won't," innocently inquired: "But, papa, what am I to say when I mean 'I won't'?" In the same spirit of uncertainty I would like to know what I am to say when I mean "don't." Auretta Roys Aldrich, who has written a book on "Children—Their Models and Critics," in which she is rather severe upon adults, tells us a harrowing tale of a mother and a five-year-old boy who sat near her one day on a railway train. The child thrust his head out of the window, whereupon the mother said tersely: "Johnnie, stop putting your head out of the window!"