Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/63

 Rh the letter back into his keeping, showed that he was contending for a principle, and not for possession or any selfish interest."

Readers of George Eliot may be pleasantly reminded of that scene in the "Mill on the Floss" where Tom Tulliver unthinkingly withdraws a rattle with which he has been amusing baby Moss, "whereupon she, being a baby that knew her own mind with remarkable clearness, instantaneously expressed her sentiments in a piercing yell, and was not to be appeased even by the restoration of the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it taken away from her remained in all its force." But to some of us the anecdote of Edwin and his wheelbarrow is more disheartening than droll. The revelation of such admirable motives underlying such inexcusable behavior puzzles and alarms us. If this four-year-old prig "contending for a principle and not for possession" be a real boy, what has become of all the dear, naughty, fighting, obstinate, self-willed, precious children whom we used to know; the children who contended joyously, not for principle, but for precedence, and to whom we could say "don't" a dozen