Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/115

 No one had imagined it. Yet it was flung forth like spray from the wave—in work.



Sometimes, perhaps, the secret is flung forth, but remains a secret. In the violin, for example, there is something that is never recognized, never explained. It is, above all, the old violins, the great old violins, which hold this secret, which is also a spell. Something in the heart of the violinist answers to it, and he loves it as he might love a beautiful mistress without understanding it. It is said that the old violin makers did not want to tell their secrets, and so took them to the grave with them. But perhaps they did not even know them—but projected some wonderful part of themselves which afterwards, in others, never broke a way into the outer chambers of the workaday life.

The ways in which children's condition varies in different classes of the community are not always to be accounted for. It seems, at the first blush, as if the poorest and most neglected were not, after all, having the worst of it in every respect! But in so