Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/118

108 a lover of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a case like this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told, laughed mischievously as he proffered his excuse. Such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as the uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is hard to be quite as much put out by them.

These excuses often show a fine range of inventive activity. How manifold, for example, are the reasons, more or less fictitious, which a boy, when told to make less noise, is able to urge in favor of noncompliance! Here, of course, all the great matters of the play world, the need of getting his "gee-gee" on, of giving his orders to his soldiers, and so forth, come in between the prohibition and compliance. And disobedience in such cases has its excuses; for to the child his play-world, even though in a manner modeled on the pattern of our common world, is apart and sacred; and the conventional restraints as to noise and such like, borrowed from the every-day world, seem to him to be quite out of place in this free and private domain of his own.

We all know the child's aptness in "easing" the pressure of commands and prohibitions. If, for example, he is told to keep perfectly quiet because mother or father wants to sleep, he will prettily plead for the reservation of whispering ever so softly. If he is bidden not to ask for things at the table, he will resort to sly indirect reminders of what he wants, as when a boy of five years and a half whispered audibly, "I hope somebody will offer me some more soup," or when a girl of three years and a half, with still greater childish tact, observed on seeing the elder folk eating cake, "I not asking." This last may be compared with a story told by Rousseau of a little girl of six years who, having eaten of all the dishes but one, artfully indicated the fact by pointing in turn to all the dishes, saying, "I have eaten that," but carefully passing by the untasted one.

When more difficult duties come to be enforced and the neophyte in the higher morality is bidden to be considerate for others, and even to sacrifice his own comfort for theirs, he is apt to manifest a good deal of skill in adjusting the counsel of perfection to young weakness. Here is an amusing example: A little boy, Edgar by name, aged five years and three quarters, was going out to take tea with some little girls. The mother, as is usual on such occasions, primed him with special directions as to behavior, saying, "Remember to give way to them, like father does to me." To which Edgar, after thinking a brief instant replied; "Oh, but not all at once. You have to persuade him."

A like astuteness will show itself in meeting accusation. The